Talker
by MorningHell
Summary: (Set post-movie) He's a zombie, like the others. ...Isn't he? It's in the hands of Ana and the others to decide whether or not to pull the trigger.
1. Low Tide

**Talker**

Author's Note: This story isn't perfect. It's sort of quick and not all things work flawlessly, but I liked playing with the idea. The two characters mentioned in the story are entirely original (in case for whatever reason it inspires some kind of confusion). So bear with me and review. ^^ The story hopefully gets better later on.

The sun rose black over the still surface of gray tides, swirling aimlessly over and over like mist over ice against pallid rocks beneath and hidden around a gritting sand. It was all silent and silver to the eyes that threw glances over them, catching a wayward gull or a fishing swallow twirling artfully through a turbulent gust of wind. His name was Tyler Kawazumi, a small man of clear Japanese heritage who was lank, thin, slack shouldered and thin-waisted, his face sporting a tuft of black hair on the edge of his chin that was now spreading up his jawline to add on to his sharp Asian features. Longish, blackish-brown hair that didn't quite touch his shoulders was scruff with streaks of blood and earth, sticking in his eyes when his hand was too tired to push them away. He was in his early twenties, somewhat shy and clever, retained and placid, but regretably fatigued and distant at the moment. He sat with his feet submerged slightly in the water's edge, watching as the current swept over them once, twice, and subsided for a while to take its rest. He was observing the scene anew through silver-tainted eyes, for as he had awakened this morning to an awkward light peering through his irises, he had suddenly found his world in the absence of color, waking to the bleak and dreary with a muted wonder. No longer did his dirt-clashed skin have its bronze, nor his cuts drooling with the red he would have recognized as opposed to this now shimmering mercury... It seemed more important to worry of other matters, however, and so this color blindness was put off like a small discomfort for a time. It was only now that he was beginning to grasp the strangeness of it.

            "Hey Tojo!" snapped a voice from behind, and he leapt to his feet like a trained hound to meet the owner of this command. A tall man, likely also early in his years if not a tad over, not particularily imposing but rather lean and hungry looking came striding down the beach with a strained manner. He was grime covered and sickly looking, scraggled hair mussed over a plainly unattractive face holding a scowl. His long, narrow feet hopped one over the other as he approached, and Tyler lowered his head. 

            "Mr. Dunmoor." He said in an soft, lilting voice, one not quite deep enough to boast anything but his relative youth. 

            "Hey, enough with the 'last names' shit, okay? I can't even fucking pronounce yours." the tall man said, looming over the littler man with a tremendous shrug skyward. "Just call me Tom. You know? T-O-M. Got it?"

            "Got it." He repeated, turning his head away so as not to face him so closely.

            "Fag." Tom huffed as he walked to the edge of the water and shuffled a long foot into the pale sand. 

            There was silence for a while, each one presumedly contemplating. Tom then turned back around and carlessly plucked Tyler in the shoulder with a fist. "This is just like that movie, you know, Night of the Living Dead. You ever seen it? You get those type a'movies in Japan?"

            Tyler absently put a hand to the shoulder, eyebrows raising as he processed the question. "No…Well…I mean…" he cleared his throught, letting his eyes drift back to the sand. "I told you before, I'm not from Japan. I was born in Salem. Oregon. America, you know." His eyes came back to meet the hollowed-out face of his companion.

            "You don't have a sense of humor, do you, jackass? Lighten up, will you? I heard you the first damn time, it was a joke." Tom snarled back in a rattling voice before chuckling. Tyler doubted, however, that such was really the case. "Whatever. It's a beautiful day," he turned back the the ocean and threw up his arms. "why let a little thing like the end of the world ruin your beautiful day? Huh?!" he then started cackling like a drunken teenager, collapsing onto the sand and kicking a heel into the ground. Tyler shook his head and looked back out onto the waves of the ebony ocean waters.

            "What did you find?" he asked, gazing at a smear of what was most likely blood on his palm. Right now he couldn't tell the color through his disabled vision.

            "A whole lotta nothin'." Tom answered, seemingly annoyed every time he was forced to talk to his only company. "Everything's desserted. What, you think I found a running strip bar and a Mcdonalds or something?" he snorted.

            "I just thought…"

            "Yeah, well, if I _did_ find anything, why the hell would I have come back?" Tom hissed meanly as he flopped onto his back in the dry sand.

            "Mm." The young man turned away, letting his arms fall at his sides and blinking slowly. Life so devoid of meaning. How could he argue? How to protest? There was never a good enough reason to counter _this_ man with. He had learned that rather quickly once caught up into the swing of the way things were now set to work. He had first come across one Mr. Thomas Jay Dunmoor a week and a half ago, or at least that time seemed an appropriate guess to Tyler. He had camped out on the surface of some rooftop, and had scrambled in such a hurry that now he could not even recall exactly what type of building it had been. Not a tall one, certainly, only perhaps twenty-five feet off the sweltering asphalt. He fancied that he'd taken up a good spot; not a single one of those half-eaten human creatures had seemed to notice him. He'd seen them wandering off a ways of about two hundred feet, dragging mangled forms across the once urban scene and occasionally stumbling along the way, graciously oblivious to his position. He held his breath every time they were in sight, only drawing it out when the creature at last dissappeared and he felt it safe to assume he may live, at least until nightfall, once again. That's when Tom had found him.

Tyler at first could not comprehend the figure coming towards him, and in all of the prior instances of these zombies passing him by without a second glance, he ignorantly had been spoiled into thinking that he should not fret if they came a few feet closer than they had previously dared. But this time, the creature was coming nearer and nearer until it was only a scant fifty feet from the building upon which he had perched, and did not look as though he had the intention of moving on soon as he ambled, searched around, and paused every so often. It was only after a tidal wave of cold horror had washed over him before Tyler realized that this man may not have even been a zombie at all. He was haggard with gleaming eyes and a stony snarl of hate implanted onto his face, but it also bore the semblance of tiredness, something you could not sense in the greedy, ever-ravenous eyes of the demons that had so recently walked the streets adjacent. After a few anxiuos moments, this man came away from his vision, and he nervously peered around the edges of the building in wary search.

Shuffling sounds, like tin scraping metal. Coming from one side of the building, and then the other. That creature had scaled the fire escape. Tyler whipped around and threw scouring glances to all edges of his only safe haven, praying that the unthinkable idea of one of those mindless beasts having such initiative was truly as ludacris as it seemed. But such luck wasn't with him. He froze as he heard a grunt, much closer than he had expected it to be. He backed up until the concrete edges of the surrounding miniature wall touched the back of his knees, half fearing in the recesses of his mind that he would have to jump. Surely he could have survived the fall…not in perfect health, however. In the end, he was far too paralyzed to even consider the option. All that was left to do was face whatever came to claim him.

The unshaven mess of a man had landed on the rooftop, sighed, looked around once and cracked his neck before his eyes fell studying onto Tyler. And then he had laughed.

Tyler's head spun and he touched his temple lightly, gazing down at the length of the beach to regain his focus at the vagueness of the memory. Tom had treated him as though he were some incompetent fool ever since that moment, and though they had spent much time together since, rarely ever spoke. Or that is to say, Tyler rarely did so. Tom spoke often, hardly giving his new accquaintance a word in edge wise. Not that it bothered him, entirely. There was little he wished for Tom to know, and even less that Tom wished to know of him. And so sat their mutual relationship of distrust and unwilling dependence for companionship. Wherever one went, the other followed, but always kept his distance.

"It's not so bad, ya know." Tom shouted suddenly, breaking Tyler's thoughts. "It's sort of everything everyone wants, huh? A life on the beach? Hell, I was a construction worker before this, no days lounging on the coast of Cancun for me. Yep. I like this place." He rested his arms behind his head, body spread out over the sand. "Like the hell out of it."

Tyler may have even smiled at the sheer absurdity of his cohort, had his sense of humor not been so badly wounded. Tom put up a grand façade of snide indifference, a feature that was only ironically outdone by his obvious appearance of constant frustration. He breifly thought in the back of his head, _I wonder if he was normal before this started._ His cynical side predictably answered with a nonchalant _Does it matter_? Tyler himself barely thought he could recollect who or what he was before the infection, and now it didn't matter. You are defined by those who know you, those who named you, but now all of those people were dead. The things you've accomplished and your goals for the future, but now survival was the only and unanimous goal of anyone still living. The places you go and the hobbies you're interested in, but now there was no familiar place that was safe, and no time or inspiration for any kind of hobby. You no longer existed. You had to completely start over now. In a way, it was like being born again. In a bigger way, it was like being dead.

"I was thinking I could build a summer hom-" Tom began.

"We can't stay here." Tyler said fluidly, cutting him off as he raised his head to stare with dark eyes.

Tom pushed himself up onto his elbows indignantly, looking over a shoulder and seeming extremely put off about being interupted. "Well who the fuck asked you?"

"We don't have anything to help us survive." He bitterly shook away the double meaning to that statement. "We'd have to go back into town or something…I don't know. We'll starve to death out here."

"Hey, if you're goin' back into town, you wanna stop and grab me a burger? No wait—make it something with chicken, I'm on Atkins. You don't mind, do ya?" Tom lay back into the sand and covered his face with his hands tiredly. "Shut the _fuck_ up." He added, ending his chain of superfluous sarcasm.

Once again, another concern thwarted by stubborness. Tyler sighed, rubbing a hand into his dark locks before holding his gaze back onto the edging of a sinking sun.

            _Author's Note: I know, I know. The first chapter doesn't offer much, but it's a setter._


	2. Wake Up Call at Dawn

Talker – Chapter 2: Wake Up Call at Dawn 

_Author's Note: Chapter two…Now it gets moving a little._

Sleep does not come easily to those who fear waking. For the last few days, Tyler had not even tried to sleep through the haze of unshakable terror, and would often sit up with a blank stare until, to his surprise, he realized that he had been wide awake from sunset to sunrise. Now exhausted and nerve-wracked, he was forced into a dizzy submission as he lay shivering on his side in the cooling sand. Every now and then he would drop off slightly, only to be jolted awake by the slightest scuttle of an insect or the faintest wash of the tide. The tormenting cycle ran through him dozens of times until at last, the distant snapping of a branch sprang him into full consciousness perhaps for good. He clung to his shoulders, eyes wide but empty, head filled with the ever present questions 'what if?', 'what now?', and 'what for?'. He was starved, but he didn't have the will to eat. Thirsty, but there was nothing to drink in convienient proximity except for a case of luke warm Coors, and the taste of the alcohol was starting to make him feel even sicker. He was cold as well, but didn't have the energy to try and start a fire.

Realizing that he would not find sleep this night, he slowly sat up and looked around, a subconscious search for any sign of zombie life as he did so. That's how every glance had become, it was always what he expected to behold. He observed only the rolling of the tide becoming slightly more instense, now reaching up to the spot where Tom lay and already touching his feet. Tom was somehow flat out in deep slumber, as though the total damnation of an entire civilization truly did not weigh on his mind at all. Though even if Tom was cold, crude, and conceded, Tyler found it hard to believe that a person could not mourn if just a little for the tragedy, whether or not they chose to show it directly.

Nothing could be heard save for the nearly silent croaking of some midnight insects and the every-so-often trill of a wayward sea bird close by, calling over the sweep of the receeding tide waters. It was the most peaceful scene Tyler thought he could ever recall, and that fact only soldified its eerieness as opposed to bringing him comfort. Nothing now would ever bring him ease, he knew that. It would still be nice to hope that one day he would be able to close his eyes again. He looked over again at Tom, now seeing that the tide was rolling all the way up to his shins and soaking his pant legs, but not stirring him in the slightest. By now, little beach crabs were beginning to pick at him every now and then. He could've slept through an army of undead corpses marching over his head and still wouldn't have complained about it. He honestly wondered how Tom had survived before they had crossed paths, being such a heavy sleeper and somewhat ignorant to his surroundnings. But that mixed with Tyler's edgy paranoia had kept them both in a safe balance thus far. 

Another branch snapped off in the distance, but he forced down his initial fear with tremendous effort. He couldn't allow himself to tuck his tail every time a tree shifted. He was briefly reminded of the days when he was very small, a frightened child who had no taste for a thunder storm and sleeping with a pillow over his head. He never liked thunder storms, but where they had once scared him, they now depressed him. In his early days when he owned his first apartment, before having moved to Milwaukee, he had a dog. Some little mix breed mutt, good at taking his mind off of things, especially the oppressive wash of rain on his window pane. But that dog was dead now—just like everyone else. A dim memory that brought him bitterness instead of the warmth he may have hoped for. The dry crunching from the trees came again, but this time he couldn't swallow the cold shudder. Another crunch. 

And a moan.

Springing to his hands and knees, Tyler floundered in the sand for a moment to try and find the spot from which the sound was coming. A garbled scream followed, then a strident clatter, like bodies tripping down over the rise of the small hill off to the right of him. For some reason, he just could not bring himself to move—until he saw the dangling arms of a sillouhette emerging from the treeline. 

He instinctively scrambled backwards, but couldn't seem to find his feet. "TOM!" he screamed out, a thoughtless idea…the zombie noticed the cry and snapped to attention, mauled head zipping around in violent desperation to find its source and mouth hanging agape in a drooling countenence of shock. There was no reason to keep quiet now; the thing would inevitably find them. "Tom! Tom! Get up!" Tyler continued to yell, ferociously climbing to his feet in panic and tripping down the edge of the beach. To his annoyance, he found that Tom was not awake at all when he at last stumbled down to his side. "Would you _wake up_, you _stupid_ asshole!?" he fisted his hands into Tom's shirt, lifting him up with an uncharacteristic bout of strength and knocking him back against the ground just as quickly.

"Wha-ah, huh?" he slowly came to, looking up at Tyler with a little bit of confusion and then a heavy punch of anger. "What-WHAT?" he snarled, shoving the smaller man way harshly and making him fall back.

"Get up!" he forced himself shakily to his feet in a wild hurry. "Get up, are you _deaf_?! They _found_ us!"

Tom jerked upwards as though someone had pulled a rope fastened tightly around his neck, swiveling his head around and gaping at the creature that was now _running _down the beach towards them. And it wasn't alone: more soon followed suit, arms outstretched in a flying attempt to somehow catch their prey before they were within a hundred feet of it, tongues rythmatically sloshing out of their crumbled teeth in a way that much resembled charging dogs. "Why the hell didn't you wake me up!?" Tom shrieked as he leapt to his feet and took off before Tyler could respond. Tyler was up in an instant as the closest corpse's features became clear, sprinting after Tom as fast as he could with a high-pitched yelp of terror. 

They crashed through brush and boat debris along the beach without concern to minor cuts and gashes on their legs or feet as they went, searching for some kind of escape route. The only thing that lay before them was the abandoned dock and the open water. As they approached, however, their only option became grimly clear. Those dead animalistic skeletons were already infesting the docks, idly standing about around the boats as though they were trying to place some kind of familiarity from a past life. They almost looked entirely harmless, and very nearly a simple part of the scenery, until of course they saw these new arrivals running for the lives they themselves had long forgotten. And then nothing mattered but the blood. From both sides, Tyler and Tom were about to be swarmed by a throng of roughly twenty undead, feet thunking against the wooden dock as they tore after the two men and swashing through the sand behind them. They could either swim for it, or get eaten.

Tyler frantically stopped and spiralled his vision in every direction. There, to his near immediate left—the closest thing to them, and a true miracle if not the most fortunate of flukes, was a small fishing boat, big enough for three to four people. Noticing it, he reached out and snatched Tom by the shirt to thrust him towards it. Tom tripped and stumbled into it, and thankfully, it was tied only loosely, easily pried away by a flick of Tyler's wrist as he half-fell backwards into it himself and onto a board harshly. His upper back ached as he flung himself up, arms hanging over the edge as he fumbled for an oar. The dead people were already wading out into the water after them, reaching out and trying to keep their heads above the surface of the water to see their way. Some of the heavily torn apart or those lacking in limbs became submerged as they clawed their way along, disappearing into the water competely and never resurfacing. The two survivors managed to shove the boat away from the shore with enormous strain, but still the spitting beasts found their way to them with alarming speed. They threw themselves off the docks and into the water, grabbing for the edges of the boat—only to be driven away by Tom, who had luckily found a long fishing knife, and albeit rusted, he was making good use of it. Fingers jetted from the sides of the boat as he slashed at them, spraying blood and greatly impairing their captive grip.

With fevered, wheezing gasps, Tom was hacking as hard as he could at their heads and shoulders, snapping out any vulgar thing he could possibly think of at the top of his lungs and emphasizing each curse with a violent bash of the knife. Tyler fought as hard as he could to push the boat away with his only oar, panicking as he felt it being pulled rigidly against his hold by some unseen force under water. Obviously one of those demons had gotten under the boat. Somehow, with a force rather beyond him but rather unimprotant at the time, he heaved it out of the thing's hands without pulling himself into the water or overturning the boat. He would later, upon reflection, decide that it must have been the balancing weight of the dead arms holding the other side of it down that had kept them from capsizing. He was shaken quickly from his own dillema when he heard Tom scream.

He turned in time to catch one of the corpses with a handful of Tom's hair, reaching and chomping ferociously for his neck. Such pure, raw, beastial desperation was a sickening sight upon the features of one that had surely once been able to _think_, to _reason_. To control itself. Tyler pushed down the surge of rotten bile and jammed the butt of the oar into the creature's face. To his surprise, it fell away instantly, almost making him fall over when he reared it up to offer another (now uneeded) blow. Slowly they were all falling away, chopped apart and unable to keep up without their hands and arms, or in some cases, heads. The fear and the tremendous shock, however, remained with the two men until they were well out of harms way and into the open ocean, where the cantankerous cries of enraged animated cadavers could only faintly be heard. As of now, only their drifting forms could be spotted, features industinguishable as they made one final fevered dash towards their fleeting prey.

Tyler sat staring back out at them, fingers clutched so tightly around the hand of the oar that the knuckles were bone white and he could scarcely move them. One of his feet was still lifted up as though in preperation to make a move that had never been made, chest quaking with what was either the struggle for a chance to vomit or the refusal to emit a sob. His grip was gradually relaxing, a cold sweat beginning to trickle down his neck, and suddenly, before he knew it, the oar had dissappeared from his hands and was moving slimly away against the still waters. It didn't even occur to him that he might retrieve it. 

"Shit-FUCK!" Tom choked out, clutching at his head as if making sure that it was indeed still intact. "God damn it, son of a bitch! God _damn_ it!"

Tyler couldn't for the life of him understand what Tom was so upset about. They had only left the shore behind that had given them no form of subsistence. They were better off this way, and it was possibly their best option. Those corpses wouldn't be intelligent or able enough to swim this far out. But then again, the boat offered them no further means of survival than the deserted beach front. Less, in fact. They would have to find an island, but which direction would they go? And how could they know which direction they were going at all? The mixed blessing it was, Tyler could not side with either his pessimism or his optimism at the moment. "You okay?" he said lightly, watching Tom rub the bruises around his neck.

"Fucking fabulous, dipshit!" he spat back, tossing the long knife clumsily to the bottom of the boat. Tyler jumped as the blade landed close to one foot. "I've _never_ felt better."

"You're still alive, aren't you?" Tyler said with a note of cynicism. 

Tom didn't seem to know how to respond to that as he snarled and flipped out a certain finger before mouthing some kind of threatening insult. "And stuck with you." He finally added, satisfied with the implied venom in that remark.

"Would you rather be stuck with one of them?" Tyler shook his head and drew his arms up against his chest. He then snorted and let his eyes wander. "Never mind. I'm sorry I said that. I don't usually like to ask stupid questions."

            The sun began to rise, golden and crisp over the flat ocean before them, or at least that was the color Tyler remembered it being. 

"Coulda fooled me, fucktard." Tom muttered back, rubbing two fingers slowly over the bleeding teeth marks carved deep into his forearm.


	3. Tsunami Forecast

**Talker** - Chapter 3: Tsunami Forecast 

_Author's Note: This chapter's sort of long, but it's important. In case you're wondering by now, no, this story doesn't have only my originals in it. The other characters will show up. Technically, the real story hasn't even begun yet. And by the way, Graymoon, you rock. It's people like you I'm writing stuff for…you know…people who rock. Um, right, okay. The point is, thanks for the words. They mean much. ^^_

            Tom gripped the underside of the lid on the cooler that sat between them, just now realizing that it had been there the entire time once initial shock had abaded. It was filled with ice, and a few cans of beer. "Hell yes." Tom growled, taking one and tearing it open before he guzzled nearly half the can. "Drink up. It could be your last." He ordered.

            "I don't want to." Tyler sighed under his breath.

            "Better to die drunk." Tom decided. "Fine. Suit yourself, Jap." 

            Tyler let a hot breath rush through his nose. "Fine. So die drunk. You don't mind if I live sober, do you?"

            "Actually, I'd sort of prefer it if you fell overboard and drowned." Tom licked his cracked lips and drank the rest of his beer.

            The notion came to Tyler that perhaps he should respond the way he felt, just this once. For the first time, he really did feel like hitting his companion in the jaw. He wasn't exactly sure why, perhaps just the relentless and outright animousity was so unwarranted that it had finally gotten to him. He had usually just dismissed those comments before, seeing Tom's harsh outbursts as an emotional crutch that allowed him to cope with the situation at hand. As long as he could express his anger, he could remain stable. Yelling at Tyler was an outlet. For his anger, for his fear, for anything. Tyler _knew_ this…and so he let it slide, once again. Underneath a layer of jackass, Tom had to be sensibly normal, he supposed.

            "So what did you do? Before." Tom's sudden question brought Tyler snapping back out of his analysis, eyes wide at the instigation of an actual conversation. "Let me guess; burger flipper? Gas pumper? No wait—still lives with his parents, right?"

            Tyler gaped for a moment in surprise, fumbling for an answer. "I was…I was a journalist."

"Hm. Sounds boring." He jeered, pulling open another beer. "I flunked out of high school english. All four years. Come to think of it," he paused, chuckling at some past memory. "I pretty much just flunked out of high school. But at least I didn't end up a _writer_." He paused for a minute. "You wrote in Japanese?" that just seemed to come naturally. 

Tyler threw a glance skyward in annoyance and held up one open hand. "No, I didn't. And let's just get a few things right, okay? Number one: I don't speak Japanese, I don't _know_ Japanese. My parents don't even speak it, they moved from Japan when they were four an seven. I don't write it, I don't speak it, I don't know it, okay? Number two, I was born in America. I told you that. And if you ever call me Jap again, I don't care if you _are_ the last man I might ever meet on the face of the planet, I'll drown you." He pointed a finger.

            "I'm just trying to make a fucking conversation here, how many hoops do you want me to jump through?" Tom put up a curtain of anger to mask an air of what was likely pleasure at Tyler's irritance. "What did you write? That's all I was fucking asking."

Tyler seriously doubted that Tom cared. But what choice did he have? He couldn't very well ignore him. "I was writing an article for a magazine. I sort of hoped to be making that my career."

"Well that's even more boring than I thought." He nodded.

            "Yeah." Tyler snorted, rubbing the back of his neck as he looked away absently. 

            " 'Yeah'," Tom mocked in a baffoonish voice as he thumped his foot against the cooler.

            There was a strange silence settling between them after that, unexpectedly uncomfortable considering that they had been speaking so freely only moments before. These specific feelings were becoming more and more frequent as of late, coming on them without warning and plunging them both into a maddening detatchment. Perhaps it was just one of the moments where another detail of their own personal disaster had caught up with them. The thing that surprised Tyler the most was how easy it was to forget that the world behind you had just come to an abrupt halt. He would have thought (mostly calculated from B-grade post-apocolyptic movies he managed to recall) that everywhere you looked you would find another mangled reminder of what was once something it now was not. He himself had never been a man of great change, and had even been nervously wary about his new settlement so far from his childhood home, let alone the complete abandonment of civilization. Therefore he was shocked that he could remain so segregated from his own anxieties when having received so much difficulty from them before. He supposed that he could at least halfway attribute his apathy to the numb kind of assumption that he would not live much longer. They both had that feeling, he was sure. As far as they new, the population of the city, perhaps even the state, had been reduced to two souls, and men don't live forever.

            Just two survivors, though he didn't often think of them that way. The word 'survivor' didn't seem to fit their haggard situation, living every day dying a little more than each knew was possible. Those dead creatures lingered on after taking much more damage and would outlive them until their bodies crumbled into the purest nothing, teeth still grinding in their gums. _They_ were the survivors... _They_ were the ones _surviving_. The only small victory would be in dying without giving those animals the chance to make you one of them, but even that was a hollow sort of triumph. You knew your life was headed in a bad direction when your biggest goal was to die and never get up again. Even so, the depression never quite met up with you. He had somehow, through this, learned to think without the hindrance of emotion. Though every once in a while, he would have to supress a cold shiver when he thought about his close friends or his parents, even with no proof that they had ever had the chance to have been effected. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew. It seemed only common sense, after all. But unlike these people he remembered, tears were a part of his humanity that he didn't miss much. 

            He looked up for a moment at Tom, who was still drinking and looking over the edge of the boat with his undying scowl. Even through his color blindness, he noticed that he seemed horridly paler than before. "I never even fished before." He muttered suddenly. "Hey, what about you? I thought all your people ate was fish and rice."

            "I've fished before." Tyler bent his head down and tried to ruffle the sand out of his hair. 

            "…Wow, what an interesting story." Tom rolled his eyes and tossed another empty can over his shoulder. It hit the back of the boat and jumped off into the water with a silent splash. "God, isn't there a single fucking thing about you worth knowing?"

            Tyler paused for a moment, then shrugged.

            Tom became even further exasperated at that. "You ever killed anyone? Shot anyone?"

            "No." he answered. "I was robbed once though. By some kid." He offered after a few seconds of deliberation.

            "By a kid?" Tom waited for a further explanation, but one was not given. "Yeah. Fascinating."

            "And you? I guess you must've done some pretty interesting things." Tyler brought up, considering that Tom seemed so desperate for conversation (i.e. an excuse to hear himself speak). 

            "Yeah? Why the hell should I tell you about my personal life? You think it's any of your damn business?" he sniffed hard, grimacing as though trying to fight of some kind of muscle cramp in his stomach. "I ain't here to fuckin' entertain you."

            Tyler, becoming increasingly disturbed, bit down absently on his thumb to try and stifle his frustration as he looked out into the gray water. "Whatever."

            "This look infected?" Tom changed subjects as he pointed to his ankle. "I was clipped by one of those damn crabs the other night. It's practically turning green."

            All Tyler could really see was what looked like a bruise. "I…I don't know."

            Tom scoffed. "What the hell does that mean? You don't know. Huh? Can't you _see_?"

            "Haven't been able to see in color lately." Tyler divulged, waiting for what was sure to be an calluos chuckle at his plight. "Just woke up and it was black and white."

            Tom appeared to be confused, though obviously not concerned. "No shit?" 

            "Yeah. Freak thing, I guess."

            There was another hesitation. "Since when?"

            Tyler looked down at his knee, which he now realized had a few deep splinters sticking out of it. "Yesterday."

            "Why?"

            "I don't know." He threw up one arm, letting it drop back into his lap. "I must've hit my head. I don't remember."

            Tom fidgeted in his spot for a second before crossing his arms over his knees and laughing. "Wow. You're really fucked, huh?"

            He didn't respond, gingerly plucking three of the slivers of wood from his leg in a brisk motion. It stung badly.

            "Not that it matters. Can't imagine a guy like you's gonna live much longer anyway."

            Perhaps it was just spurred by the annoyance of the sudden pain in his leg, or the poorness of his mood at the moment, but that comment struck a chord in him. "What the hell is it you have against me, Tom?" he asked quietly.

            Tom didn't say anything for a while. "…What?" he grunted, extending his thumbs outward in a lazy shrug. 

            "What the _hell _do you _have_ against me?" he repeated, his eyes meeting his companion's.

            "You're a fucking stiff." Tom decided.

            "That's it?" Tyler took in a breath. 

            "Uh, yeah? Isn't that what I said?" Tom snarled back, rubbing his head with a pained manner. 

"Really Tom, what is it that you hate so much about me?" he insisted, raising his voice. 

            "You're just one of those boring ass Asian stiffs, okay?" he said again. "Guys like you should go back to your own fucking country, where it's _normal_ to be boring as all hell!"

            "That's what it is?" Tyler flung his arms out and laughed loudly. It was a hopeless, desperate laugh like man gives when he's reached his wit's end. "That's what it is? Do you think it matters now, Tom?" he growled as he threw the wooden splinters into the water in a harsh thrust. "Damn it, d-do you _really_ think it _fucking _matters _now_?"

            Tom had a clearly shocked look on his face at Tyler's jump from quietness.

            "The only two fucking living guys in a five hundred mile radius and all you can think about is how _different_ we are? What the _hell_ is that, Tom? Huh?"

            "Oh so what now, this is gonna be some racist thing?" Tom fought back, throwing an only half-empty beer onto the floor of the boat and sending its contents spilling out. "You're a God damn joke, _Jap_!" he spurned. "I don't care what fucking race you are! I mean hey, if you were a woman, I'd probably consider fucking you! I just _hate guys like you_!"

            "_What_ kind of guys, what the fuck _am_ I?" Tyler spat back.

            "I already said it, you're one of those God damn meek Asian wusses! It's just fucking irritating!" he kicked the still draining can of beer.

            There was a long hesitation on Tyler's part as he let his hands hang out in the air for a minute. "How the _hell_…is that not racist?!" his voice reached a high-pitch of disbelief. "You know what, Tom, I'm not too fond of guys like _you _either! People who are just _bastards_ for no reason at all!"

            "Yeah?!" Tom stopped for a second to cough, looking like he was about to throw up, but he shook it off. "Fuck you! You woulda been dead if I hadn't found you!"

            "Hey, likewise!" Tyler defended. 

            This time, Tom's coughing fit didn't subside, and he threw up over the edge of the boat.

            "God, you drunk jackass." Tyler shook his head and looked down, his anger melting back into frustrated annoyance.

            "Sh-shut up, fucker…" he wheezed painfully, still coughing. "Shit…" he leaned his head down on the side of the boat, shuddering. 

            Tyler felt a small growling sensation vibrate the hollow of his chest as he raised his eyes, but focused them off of his company.

            "If I ever fucking become one of 'em…" Tom pulled his lips back from his teeth in an ugly glower. "You're first."

            "Shut up, Tom." He sighed, putting his head in his hands.

            "You're not outliving me…I'd make…make damn sure!" his voice was becoming decreasingly confident as he leaned his head down into his lap and moaned.

            Tyler's nervousness grew as he watched Tom double over. "Whatever, okay, let's just stop fighting. Please?"

            "Nnghrn…" was all he managed back, gripping his sides. 

            "…Tom, knock it off…" Tyler edged back, grimacing.

            Tom shivered, his shoulders fell slack, and he was silent, head on his knees and a streamline of mucus trailing from his teeth.

            Tyler sat frozen, eyes wide and mouth partway open in shock. Nothing moved. All that could be heard was the small cluck of water against the sides of the boat and the brutal pumping of his nearly beat-out heart beneath a row of ribs. He didn't know what happened, nor what was wrong. Tom couldn't have gotten sick off of four beers, unless of course he had some health problem he had neglected to either mention or adheer to. "…Tom?" he tried.

            His limp form did not respond, only offering more of the dreadful suspense. He had to have just passed out…what other explanation was there? Tyler slowly reached out and pushed Tom by the shoulder, horrified when the body rocked backwards and went straight for the floor. Before he hit the ground, however, Tom bolted upright, body seizing. 

            "Tom!" Tyler cried out, leaping back in his seat. "Wh-what the hell did-"

            Tom screamed. But it wasn't the kind of scream Tyler would have expected. It wasn't a scream of pain, or fear, or anger or shock or frustration or sorrow. It was…undescribible. 

            But entirely recognizable. 

            He lunged for Tyler in a split second, hands locked onto his shoulders with a truly painful crunch and pinning him over backwards onto a plank of the boat behind them. "Shit! Tom! Stop! Get_ off _of me!" he yelled, praying beyond all logic that somehow, somewhere, some kind of plea could help him. "_Stop_ it! You—'re hurting me! Ah!!" 

            He pushed and shoved, unable to gain the right leverage to throw him off and completely helpless to crawl away when his back was bent over a wooden board. Teeth were grinding at his face, scant centimeters seperating those jaws from his neck. In a desperate move, he flung up his left arm to protect his head as he turned away, and Tom sank his teeth into his forearm just below the wrist. It wasn't quite like being bitten by a cat or a dog with sharp fangs that tore the skin open. It was more like having your arm crushed by a cinder block full of teeth, bruising the flesh the full way through and pressurizing blood vessels until they burst under the strain. The bone was a fraction of a second away from shattering, and with it, the hand would easily be severed by those jagged insiscors. Tyler barked out a series of about five short screams, finding the sudden strength to hurl Tom up onto his feet and send him stumbling back on his heels to the other end of the boat with a fountain of blood following his lips. Tyler was pulling himself upright in an instant, eyes finding Tom quickly as he furiously clawed his way back to his feet and snarl at his victim. 

            "Get away from me!" Tyler bleeted, his voice faltering and his arm spouting gushes of hot red syrup. Tom was leaping at him again, and in a half blind moment of utter panic, Tyler's uninjured hand found the hilt of the long fishing knife still left discarded near his feet and thrusting it out. Tom barrelled down head first, catching the blade with his neck and sending his head splattering off its body and crashing to the floor of the boat. The still charging body clumsily lost direction and slammed into the side of the boat with its knees, almost tossing the boat sideways. The headless corpse toppled helplessly over the edge with a thrashing explosion of water, arms still clawing upward.

            In shock, Tyler threw the knife away from him and choked out a cry of disgust—mostly for the sheer idea of having beheaded someone. Blood was everywhere, pain clouded his senses, he partially stood up and looked over the side. But just as he did, his eyes fell back onto the severed head on the floor of the boat, still hissing and spewing geysers of blood. In a moment of horror and the utmost desperation not to see the ghastly thing, he cried out in a choking gag and snatched the head by the hair, tossing it into the cooler and slamming the lid shut. It twitched and rolled over the ice, making the cooler resonate a muffled gurgle. Tyler backed away, thuroughly mortified. He felt extremely dizzy, holding his dripping hand to his head and almost falling overboard himself.

            An arm shot from the water, grabbing at Tyler's shin and throwing him down to its level. Tom's decapitated form pulled itself halfway out of the water by means of Tyler's leg, arms aimlessly flailing and scratching at his clothes, trying anything to tear him apart as the living one had so promised earlier. He tried his best to pry himself away, sprawled out on his back and screaming any kind of thing that fell out of his mouth. He was pushing backwards and yet still slipping forward, now realizing that Tom was tipping the boat towards him. So great was his strength that the edge of the boat had already been submerged and the opposite was lifted cleanly off the water. Without warning, Tyler was tumbling and his breath vanished. His vision was blurred by the water, vague shadows and images his only clue as to what to flee from and what to swim to. 

            Arms grappled around his waist, randomly squeezing and beating at him with a violent force and giving him all kinds of bruises that he would surely never be rid of. He was shaken hard, and had it not been for the resistance of the water, his neck and back could have been broken by it. Not that it didn't hurt immensely all the same. He pushed and fought for all he was worth, kicking his legs and tearing at Tom's shirt and nails grazing over the stump of his neck. His lungs burned like a knife was driven into his chest, biting into his brain with the fervrant demand for breath. His struggle became harder, pulling, pushing, hitting, kicking, jerking his body wildly, and just before the he weakened, he broke free from the hold. He didn't consciously tell himself to pound towards the surface, or to gasp for breath as he burst up out of it and begin swimming laboriously even with his dark hair plastered over his eyes. He didn't even know which direction his body was taking him, but it was away, and fast, and that was all that mattered.


	4. Marooned

**Talker** – Chapter 4: Marooned 

_Author's Note: This chapter's kind of short, but it makes its point, I believe._

            He felt an inch away from hell as he threw his body up onto the shore, vomiting the water out of his stomach over and over onto the wet sand until nothing remained and he collapsed onto his chest. He couldn't guess how long he had been swimming, but it didn't seem possible that it was settling on dusk already. His breath screeched so deeply in his stomach that he was sure he would suffocate in a matter of minutes—he must have been swimming for hours. Even still, the feeling had remained that Tom was right behind him with every stroke he made, waiting to reach out and snatch him and take him down. Even now, as he lay in the sand, eyes half closed and hazed, that fear still spurred in him. But he could no longer push his body further, shivering in the cool air and half aware of twitching the fingers on his numb and bled out hand. He'd never felt so vulnerable before. The devil itself could be standing before him with its foot hanging above his head and all he would be able to will himself to do would be to let out the faintest of whimpers. Fear no longer mattered. His body had been spent.

            His physical pain began to take over now that he had been robbed of his intense adreniline, crashing into him like a wave and peeling back his skin to rake across every aching muscle. Every vein was pulsing, from his head to his feet, his upper back and neck to his groin, and everything inbetween. His arms were slack at his sides, buzzing from the pain and fidgeting with the urge to wipe the sand from his face but lacking the strength to do so.

            He faded restlessly. In and out of consciousness. Colored dreams behind his eyes and black and white when he opened them. When at last he lapsed out of the cycle, he realized that he could not have laid here nearly as long as he had thought, for the light had not changed around him. His breath had finally calmed into a ragged pattern, his throat raw and his body shaking, but he could at least move once more. He forced himself up onto his hands and knees, feeling as though balancing his weight took every ounce of effort left in him so as not to make a face plant back into the sand. He didn't recognize where he was. He could have wound up on some deserted island or he could have even somehow gotten turned around and landed back onto the beach he had tried to escape just a few hours before. Whatever the case, he knew that lying out in the open was a bad option wherever he happened to be. 

            His legs felt like melted lead as he lifted them up, trying to keep himself standing once he reached his height. Ruffling his hair hard to bat away the gathering of sand, he blinked out into the distance and sighed. His head throbbed and he felt ill, the puncture wounds in his wrist still bleeding. He'd never felt worse. No less than the day he had awoken to this disaster. At least then there had been uncertainties; oppertunities to hope. But now, nothing save the greyscale before him. Still, his nonchalant detatchment kept with him and he could think of nothing else but the step after the current one as he stumbled forward into the trees of this (presumed) island. His feet were cut and bleeding, his face mussed over with sand and gore, he didn't care. Something else was in the way. That odd sick growl in the pit of his stomach.

            Water. That was all he could think about. Finding something to drink was what mattered now. Despite the irony of just having spent the past few hours of his life in the water (granted, it having been salt water), he could only follow the desire that told him to find something to drink. So he searched. 

            Night was falling, and he was growing weaker by each moment. He knew that if he passed out, he would likely not wake up again unless he had some form of rehydration. Survival instincts kicked in, and through his search, he was graciously awarded a small stream pooling down into a collected pond of fresh water. He fell to his knees awkwardly, placing a trembling hand into the water and bringing it up to his lips. He thought he felt himself drinking, going for another handful, which leaked away from his fingers as his head hit the ground. He was too tired to keep himself up, and his spinning vision did nothing to help him. The light was still grey as the edges around his world blackened and shrowded him, and he was every bit sure he would be unimaginably sore come morning. But a deeper sensation pulsed within him, willing his eyes to close and his chest to contract gently. With one further labored pant that dwindled into a languid rustle, Tyler Kawazumi was dead.  

_Author's Note: Uhrhrm, no, the story doesn't end here. _


	5. Tongue Tied

            **Talker** – Chapter 5: Tongue Tied

_            Author's Note: Now is when the REAL story begins. Enjoy._

"I'm gonna go up around that hill and make sure none of those bastards followed us." Kenneth broke the group's wallowing despair with his booming confidence. "You all stay here. You got that?"

            The other three nodded, hesitant, but without the desire to protest after such a hellish downfall in morale. Seeing no disagreement, Kenneth nodded and loaded his gun with a few shells from his pocket.

            "Be careful…" Terry muttered between small grunts, looking down as Ana tightened the bandaging around his sprained arm.

            Kenneth took the comment with only another breif nod before he disappeared into the row of trees, not daring another glance back at his companions.

            "This doesn't look too bad. Should heal up." Ana assured, patting Terry's arm once and offering a clearly forced smile.

            "Thanks, Ana." He said sincerely, letting out a breath as he flexed the hand. He felt rather ashamed of having tripped like some clumsy idiot against that rock. He had dropped the camera, that's what tripped him up. He couldn't for the life of him even remember why he had been carrying it in the first place. It just seemed like some gag to try and raise hopelessly downed spirits. Thank God for Kenneth's realization and bear-like vice grip that hoisted him from the ground in one fluid motion and hurled him back to his feet. He hadn't even noticed the crackling pain boiling in the arm until the chase subsided, and they had somehow managed to out-manuever their pursuers. Still embarassed by his foolishness, however, he was rather upset about seeing this obvious binding that now covered the injured arm.

            Nicole sat close by him, one hand clutched around his upper arm, rubbing her thumb up and down affectionately against it and the other hand ruffling the fur around Chips's neck. She had a somewhat distant look on her face, gazing away at particularly nothing with and intent blankness. There was a downed expression on Terry's features whenever he happened to glance at her, an obvious telling of his desire to comfort her somehow. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite think of what to say.

            Ana sat in the sand with her arms crossed over her knees, her eyes half open and dulled in the midst of her unwelcome musing. Part of it was the relief at the simple fact that they were not running now, safe, if only for a few moments to catch their breath, and having suffered no further casualties. Some was the ever-welling sadness that she tried not to show. Most of it, however, was a deepening frustration and anger, furious at both herself and the rest of the group for having placed such ignorant hopes on this island. This hideous chunk of land was a joke. A mockery. She felt it from the moment they had set foot upon it, and hadn't been necessarily shocked to find that its inhabitants were less than human. It seemed that even as they had been running, all she could think of was the idiocy of the situation and how clear it was that their ingenious plan had been nothing more than desperate and thoughtless wishes. How could they have thought that they would be the only ones to think of fleeing to an island once an epedemic hit mainland? Surely great scores of panicking crowds had rushed to islands like this in the beginning with the same ideas, only to bring the disease with them and not being nearly as prepared. Then the dead must have grown from there. What a stupid thing not to have even considered.

            She quickly found through this that desperation and hope were both the concoctors of illusion and nothing more. They had all said they didn't want to die in that mall, but the truth was simply, and more accurately, that none of them had wanted to die period. It was easy to desire change when current security was provided, easy to feign bravery when nothing threatened you at the moment. But when the moment comes, gnashing its teeth in your face and reaching for your throat, you are the coward again, begging for that safe place you had before. If they had all just stayed…maybe prepared a little better. Done something. They would still have the others. C.J., even Steve…and oh God, Michael. But now, there was no use for these 'what ifs'. Only 'what nows', after they had made this stupid mistake and what they could do with the time, resources, and people they still had… It all sounded so bland. She didn't think she could do a very good job of taking Michael's place as optimist.

            Kenneth was back already, and the others looked up in eagerness to hear whatever news he had brought with him. His gun was slung casually over a shoulder, his stoney expression wavering under his weariness. "Nope. Not a one. Looks like were alright to hold up here for the night."

            "We got lucky." Ana murmured, standing to her feet.

            "I'll start a fire." Terry said, not entirely sure he knew how.

            "I'll help. Better yet," Nicole tucked some hair behind her ear, taking up an unusual amount of dedication. "just let me do it. With one arm, it would be morning before you started a fire."

            Terry opened his mouth to counter that remark, but he was at a loss, so he settled for indignantly looking around for something else to do. With a glance to Ana, upon which he decided to leave her be, he stood and approached Kenneth in an intending manner. "You think this place is safe?" he asked quietly.

            "No." Kenneth gave him a look, letting his gun hang down at his side. "Do you?"

            Terry sighed unhappily, in no mood to put up with such dismal views, but in no mood to argue. "Well there can't be that many on this small island. Otherwise more would have found us by now. Right?"

            "Maybe they just found a resort." His lip curled at his own sarcasm.

            "I wonder how many there really are." Terry said, almost to himself.

            "You think it matters, kid? What's it gonna matter if it's ten hundred or ten thousand? We're out-numbered. We don't have a use for counting heads at the moment." Kenneth stared him down, not meaning to seem as imposing as he was with just his size.

            "Well…I don't know. What if there were…" he furrowed his brow and looked down. "Let's say there were a hundred. We might just be able to kill them all and take this island."

            "Kid…" Kenneth was exasperated, shaking his head in disbelief. "I'll level with you, Terry. Less than that attacked those buses, and just look how we made out. And even then, we had more ammo, more protection, and more manpower. What do we got now? Nothing."

            "I…" he grumbled, clenching the fist of his good hand. "No, I guess…I guess not. I'm just thinking that maybe we're running out of options."

            "Correction: we're _out_ of options." Kenneth pointed out. "Just keep tryin' to live. Play it by ear. S'all we can do." He offered an almost sympathetic shrug.

            That tone of abandonement rubbed Terry the wrong way, but there was nothing he could say to it. Kenneth was right, in all aspects. There was no safe haven as the Crossroads Mall had been and no weaponry like Andy's gun shop. There was just a few guns, and whatever Kenneth had left for ammunition. Pretty piss poor odds. Mostly, he worried about what this 'living by ear' would mean. As ashamed as he was at the moment for not being able to fend for himself, how could he try and take care of Nicole and Ana? And they couldn't all very well rely on Kenneth's strength alone. And while he knew this was not a time for doubt, he was having a very hard time looking for any kind of advantages they had over the dead besides intelligent thought. That would just have to be enough.

            He turned to watch Nicole building a small pit for a fire, tossing in wood scraps and anything else she could find. He wondered where she had picked up the experience. Back at the mall, they had been spoiled with luxuries all around them. Lighters, matches, whatever they wished. It must have just been one of those things she'd picked up along the way, likely from days of camping with her brothers and her father, which she had spoken of often to him. Those were some of the lovely moments where she had smiled without meaning to. Moments he wanted back, and sadly, wasn't sure if he would ever have again. But he was quickly reminded that it wasn't the time for that now.

            "It looks like this is it." Kenneth said, adressing the group. "Get as comfortable as you can."

            "What was that?" Nicole asked timidly, standing up and freezing like a rabbit.

            They all stopped to listen. One little sound could mean death waiting for them. Chips stood on straight toes, ears jumping up and down and alternately sniffing the air and ground before panting, but he wasn't barking, and so they waited.

            "You're sure you heard something?" Kenneth turned slightly to her.

            Nicole nodded harshly. "Yes. Kenneth—!" she cried out, falling back.

            And there, out of the dark shrowded trees came a figure, stumbling like a wounded animal over the sand towards them, then away, then back towards. With one topple, the creature tripped down over the rise in the sand and was at Kenneth's feet in such a sudden movement that he almost didn't have time to react. Nicole let out a cry of shock and terror. A young Asian-featured man with slitted, animalistic eyes like those of the dead, staring up at Kenneth with bleeding wounds and on awkwardly strewn legs under his collapsed form. In complete surprise, Kenneth shoved the gun instantly against the small man's temple, his finger already pulling down on the trigger before the zombie's form went terribly rigid and its mouth opened. "Don't…" it pleaded shakily, wincing away from the barrel. Its eyes shifted around and blinked. "…please…"

His finger froze.


	6. Under The Gun

**Talker** – Chapter 6: Under The Gun

_Author's Note: Chapter six. Yeah…Well, there you go._

            For an almost comical span of time, not a single breath was drawn nor a single move made amongst the group.

The survivors blanched at the unexpected plea, each still as all eyes fell onto the zombie at Kenneth's feet as the incredibility of what they had just heard sank in.

            "…D-damn it, shoot it, Kenneth!" Terry snapped quickly, eyes wide.

            The ex-law enforcer instinctively shoved the gun forward at that command, but did not fire, simply looking down at the young corpse with an expression of amazed horror. The zombie was staring up through terrified eyes, boring into Kenneth with what would seem to be some form of hypnotic trance that willed him not to blow his head off.

            "God, what…what are you waiting for?!" Nicole shouted, snatching Terry by the arm with her eyes locked onto Kenneth. "It's one of them, _kill_ it!"

            "It just _talked_." Kenneth answered in a dumbfounded hiss, unable to bring his finger away from or into the trigger.

            "It has _bite marks_, Kenneth." Terry said in a stern tone, his eyes turning serious quickly as he motioned to the creature's mangled arm.

            "But he…" Kenneth grit his teeth in frustration and stared harder at the man as if in deep concentration.

            "No…no, don't kill him." Ana's voice suddenly piped up. The others were silent, awaiting her explanation despite the high tensions of their conflict. "Look at him, Kenneth, he's not attacking. He _knows_ what the gun is. He's not one of those things."

            Kenneth considered what she said for some time, pressing the gun harder into the creature's temple before letting it droop down. "Shit…" he said defeated, backing away from the presumed zombie.

            Terry seemed very disturbed and in great disagreement over this, but he said nothing in confidence of Ana's judgement. She had said very little after they lost Michael, and what small amount she offered now was taken gravely, often ending up the final word in any matter. Even in this bizzare turn of events, this time was apparently no exception.

            The injured zombie fell back into a sitting position, distraught as tears of both horror and relief trickled down his face. He was shaking like a leaf, eerie bright eyes scanning the people before him like he was trying to decide if he should bolt. They watched him with a twin panic, mirroring his very contemplations. There was another span of dead staring, niether party able to register their options in the confusion and fear. Ana, bewildered but determined, was the first to dare and approach him.

            "Ana-" Kenneth warned in shock of seeing her step out towards him, almost reaching out to stop her. After a few short seconds of debate, however, he decided not to interupt her and his call came out with more of a 'be careful' sentiment as he raised his gun cautiously.

            She came to him edgily and very slowly, both trying to prevent the zombie from running and trying to give herself the opportunity to do just that if need be. He backed away a little when he decided that she had come too close, teeth chattering. "Tell me you can understand what I'm saying…" she ordered, lowering her body to the sand under his watchful gaze. "We won't hurt you if you don't hurt us."

            He let out a sharp cry and backed away a little further, arms shaking so badly that it was a wonder he could keep himself up at all. "You just had a _gun_ to my _head_!" he choked out in a hissed whisper.

            Ana's lips parted in awe. "What's your name?" she asked quietly.

            He looked at her like she must have been the craziest woman on earth. Then again, with only a one out of two chance, she very well could have been.

            "Do you remember what it is?" she repeated. "Your name? Answer me. Now."

            "Tyler! Yes I fucking remember my name!" he snapped, gripping at his hair. Kenneth shifted his gun at the sudden movement. "Oh God…"

            "Kenneth, put it down." She pleaded, holding up a hand to him before turning back. Reluctantly, Kenneth obeyed. "Tyler…" she swallowed and went to her knees, risking to get a little closer to him. She almost reached out a comforting hand, but quickly thought better of it. She could not yet be certain that he was indeed a man. "Were you bitten?"

            He slowly pulled his head from his hands, ravenous eyes searching over hers and leaking tears. "…Yes…" he gingerly concealed his bitten wrist with the other hand, his head low and staring blankly.

            "How long ago?" she questioned again, leaning her head down to try and catch his gaze.

            "I don't know…" he whispered. "I don't…"

            "…More than…and hour ago?" she tried to narrow her field a little.

            "Yes." Was all he answered. "I didn't know anyone else was out here…please, I know I…don't kill me, please, I didn't do anything _wrong_…"

            "We won't." Ana said, sounding almost soothing as she glanced back at Kenneth. "We won't kill you…Calm down."

            "Calm down…" he repeated with a mockish laugh that held anything but humor. "Calm down, calm down. Okay…sure…"

            "…Where did you come from…?"

            Tyler took in a breath and threw his eyes upwards, some kind of unreadable expression on his blood-streaked face. "I don't know anymore. I don't know. Where am I now?"

            "An island…Admittedly I don't know which one." She gradually eased, taking up a slightly more comfortable sitting position.

            "Well I wasn't on an island before. On a beach." He waved his hand for a moment like he was trying to retract that and say it more clearly, but instead let out a sigh and rubbed his temples idly.

            "How did you get to this island?" she probed further.

            "A boat…" his voice came out dark and heavy now, hands falling into his lap.

            She looked at him strangely for a minute, seeing that his body was drenched, but decided not to question it. "So…you don't know how long ago you were bitten." She looked back at her companions briefly. "Was it today, at least? Can you tell me that much?"

            "It was today...maybe…maybe, I think so." He nodded. "God, it was just—I-I can't believe…" he looked like he was about to go off on some kind of gibberish rant, but he quickly bit his lip instead and lowered his head back down with a couple of painful coughs.

            "…Are you…sure that…" Ana trailed off, unable to complete that thought as she watched him in wonderment. Here in front of her sat the utmost paradox of the world they now lived in, and the shock, she supposed, won out.

            Tyler wheezed, his breath coming out in muted gurgles through the mucus and the cough-torn skin in his throat. His shirt stuck tightly to his form, staining his skin with burgundy blood from his chewed up arm even through the material and giving him the image of a perpetually dying creature. Everything about his appearance suggested that he would simply fall to pieces at any given moment. It made the others increasingly nervous. Was he really dead yet? Was he trying to fool them? Would that mean he was a zombie with intelligence?—

Slowly he pitched forward and passed out into the cold sand.


	7. The Question Why

            **Talker** – Chapter Seven: The Question Why

            _Author's Note: Nyaaaaah I know, another looooong chapter. Sorry. Thanks for the reviews thus far, I'm happy that people are actually reading it. And for the record, Gray, your story didn't lower my IQ. It is at zero, and therefore invincible!! It just made me laugh 'til I peed. And choke. And…get really hungry for a minute there. Anyway, you write humor better than I do. Sooo…on to Tyler's dilemna…_

            Tyler's eyes seemed to open despite his better wishes, forcing his vision to fix back into the mechanical black and white and bringing the numb pain coursing through his brain again. He didn't wonder where he was, or what he was doing there, because (oh-so-graciously) that part of his immediate memory had been retained even through the hazy confusion of his dreams. He lay on his side in the sand, near the water of a secluded and small shore. There was a treeline roughly fifty or so feet away from him, leading into the bulk of the island. For a moment, he curiously wondered why he was left here, but quickly admonished himself for being so naïve. It was a great task to lift himself up off his throbbing shoulder, tiredly resting his weight on one hand as he surveyed his new suroundings.

            He was suffering some terrible kind of hunger, he supposed—because it was either that or, in comensurate terms of pain, there was a knife in his stomach. Since he saw no knife, he could only assume it was his severe malnourishment that pained his abdomen so greatly. His torn open arm was almost completely numb, and after a few moments of being unable to move it, Tyler was panicked into thinking that he had lost feeling in it, and that it would die and break off. Such presumptuous thoughts were replaced with relief, however, when he realized that it had merely been asleep. The tingling subsided and pain buzzed within it anew.

            It took enormous effort to draw up onto his knees, but from there, he found it not so difficult to find his feet again. Soon he was standing, only a little wobbly on sore legs. From an upright angle, he found that the trees didn't seem quite so tall, and the area around him slightly less vast. With this dull ponder, he ambled forward for the trees, hand on his head and eyes occasionally blurring. The sand tripped him up a little, and looking down in regard to the burn of sand gritting in the wounds, he made the discovery for the first time that his feet were gashed and bleeding. It didn't mean much to him at the moment, but he made a note to fix himself up later. He lifted his head from his feet quickly as he heard voices up ahead, speaking in low tones about something he could not decipher.

            As he came closer and his vision cleared up, he observed a small group of people sitting in a broken circle around a smoldering pit of wood. The fire had recently burned out, and they all wore tired, hopless faces. He was shocked to see them here. They were obviously the same group as before, they had to know he was here. In fact, they had to have put him out on the beach, because that was not where he remembered have lain. Perhaps they had just thought him dead. Whatever the case, he felt a cold sweat when a young man of the group looked up and met his gaze. All conversation in the group stopped, each turning to meet Tyler in tense positions and wondering stares. He greeted them back with an equally baffled stare, wondering quite nervously what they were thinking. In a vague attempt at appeasement, he gently held up a hand in a brief sort of wave.

            That miraculously seemed to calm them. The young light-haired woman moved first, muttering what looked like some kind of hastey assurance to the large, dark fellow sitting next to her before she stood. Tyler almost jumped back as she made her way towards him, all of the group's eyes watching the scene play out. His muscles went stiff as she approached, his apprehensive distrust rising back to the surface.

            "Hey…" she said, somewhat smiling. The kind of encouraging smile you would give to a frightened child. That alone made Tyler indignantly force up his courage. What had he to fear, after all?

            "Hi." He responded, not sounding too eager.

            "It's…it's really good to see you awake. We were worried that you'd…you know." She tried to explain, fumbling as the mention of death somehow instantly found its way to her tongue.

            "Yeah, well…so was I." He said lightly, looking back down. He couldn't bring himself to meet the challenging gazes of the people who sat staring at him a ways off.

            "We're sorry that we put you out there. We just weren't sure what you were." She said this honestly, sincerely, though he could hear the slight tip of shame in her tone.

            He could have died of bled to death on that beach discarded, but it didn't matter. Truly, he couldn't guess why they would even keep him that close. Why should they have bothered with him? "Mm." He answered distantly, eying her gesturing hands with some suspicion.

            "My name's Ana." She introduced, causing him to turn back to her face.

            He almost responded, out of mere habit, before realizing that he had already identified himself before. "Thank you." He nodded, unsure himself of exactly what he was grateful for at the moment.

            She hugged her arms tightly to herself for a minute before catching his eyes again. "Let me check out your arm." She said nervously, trying to remain objective to his humanity.

            Tyler was inclined to refuse, sheerly from the discomfort of the idea, but her next statement changed his mind.

            "I'm a doctor. Was a doctor…"

            He was situated rather awkwardly on a scattering of large driftwood lying idle on the beach sand across from Ana, who gingerly cradled his quaking arm between her hands. She examined the bite marks carefully, brow furrowed and every now and then biting her lip as though seeing something very disconcerting. He didn't know what she was looking for, it was obvious the circumstances of the wound, and wondering if it had become infected just seemed pointless. "Clench your fist here." She said, tapping his palm with a finger. He did as he was told, and was startled when a sharp spurt of blood skipped from the wound. Ana immediately let out a choked gasp and clamped her hand down over the opening, making Tyler grimace. "I-I'm sorry." She apologized, drawing out a rather mangled roll of bandaging she had concealed in her pocket. She set to work wrapping the wound tightly, intent on preventing further bloodloss.

            "God, you've lost so much blood…" she said quietly, every so often glancing up at him. "How do you feel?"

            He moved to make some kind of sarcastic comment, but he thought better of it, instead taking that question with grave consideration. "Tired. Sick." He murmured, lifting a hand to his newly bandaged wrist.

            Seeming uncomfortable, she hesitantly reach up to feel his forehead. Swallowing, she looked dismayed. "A fever."

            "Mmph." Tyler sighed, lowering his head. "Guess that explains it."

            "Well it's amazing that you're awake, let alone up and walking." She informed.

            _Comforting._ Tyler thought, but tried hard to ignore unecessary biterness.

            She quickly sensed his uneasiness and offered another apologetic smile. "Sorry. I mean, you're lucky." She began prodding his fingers to try and get a response from them. They twitched of their own accord—a good sign, he was sure.

            "It's okay." He nodded.

            "It doesn't look too serious…" she attempted to assuage his anxiety. "You'll just drink a lot of water, get some rest, okay?" Ana seemed to slip easily back into a nurse mentallity. "You need to replenish your blood supply." Though honestly she wasn't sure if that was possible in his…state.

            "Thanks." He replied. It was good to know that what ailed him was a perfectly natural human sickness, something that even a doctor with no equipment could diagnose.

            "Come over with me. You need to eat something. Drink some water." She invited, standing. She didn't seem too enthused with this offer, but it was made all the same. It took him a minute to rise, and another to focus his vision. She walked a few steps off, and he almost didn't follow. In the end, he knew he didn't have any other option.

            As they rejoined the group, all eyes fell onto Tyler, an strange air of fear settling over them. Ana was trying hard to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary, motioning for Tyler to sit and taking her place back next to Kenneth. "Tyler, this is Kenneth," she gestured a thumb. "Terry, and Nicole." She flipped out a hand in the direction of the young couple.

            He nodded, but couldn't find his voice at the moment, unwilling to socialize just yet with people that he knew could not trust him.

            "Here, eat this." Came Ana's order as she placed a sandwich wrapped in cellophane into his hand.

            Tyler looked down calculating, the idea of food making him feel nauseous but the knowledge that he must eat taking over. He could tell that he was making the others nervous with his hesitation (if he didn't want that, what _would_ he eat, after all?), so he slowly unwrapped it and muttered a thank you.

            "We haven't been on the island that much longer than you, I don't think." Ana continued to speak for the rest of the group, trying to keep an amiable mood among them. "We took a sailboat here. Before that, we were all trapped in the Crossroads Mall. We're…we're lucky that we escaped." She nodded, bringing her eyes low. How strange that she would label this situation as a blessing just to raise spirits.

            Crossroads Mall. He'd been there before. Four or five times, on occasion. Once, he remembered in particular, to buy a gift for his father's birthday, but he couldn't even recall what exactly he had gotten. Somehow that bothered him greatly.

            "Where did you come from? Do you remember?" she asked him, watching as he took a bite and flinched. Egg salad. Definitely not his favorite.

            "We traveled a pretty good distance." He then paused, realizing how 'we' must have sounded to them. He didn't want to give the painful explanation of his former companion, but he had unwittingly put it out on the table already. "Um, he…Well, I only ever found one other person. Until…until you four. We both just wandered. Eventually wound up on the beach." He stopped there, mind clouding in the midst of such a flurrying memory.

            "On this beach?" Ana asked.

            "No." Tyler answered back. "No, we…well we seperated."

            "Seperated?" Kenneth spoke up. "You just…parted ways?" he raised an eyebrow.

            "No, it wasn't like that. I mean he…we were…" the memory seemed to grin at him, happy to present its ugliness in his face. He didn't want to think about it, and yet it was all he could.

            "Well how did you just happen to leave him?" Kenneth's tone was pressuring.

            "You think I killed him." He stated, becoming stern as he raised his eyes. No one said a word, all frozen at the accusation before a mixture of shame and curiousity crept over them. It _was_ what they had been leaning towards, and without direct conformation, they still had that uncertainty. Tyler sighed deeply and snorted, shaking his head. "He was bitten and I didn't realize it. Not before he was swallowing a chunk of my arm."

            That statement made the others reel a little, a dark vibration filtering through each of them with the grim reminder of what it felt like to watch an infected person turn. Their assumptions had been put to rest rather brutally, but accompanied also by slight relief.

            Ana looked at the others with an expression that advised them to be careful about what they said, turning her attention back to Tyler.

            "Sorry…I didn't…mean to put it like that." He held up a hand, seeing that this was not starting out on the right foot.

            "It's okay. I think we all know what it's like." Ana said, putting her hands in her lap. "Why don't you tell us about yourself?"

            "About me?" he blinked repeatedly, haphazardly pointing a hand in his own direction. "…what do you mean?"

            "Who are you?" she clarified. "Where do you come from?"

            "Oh…well…" swallowing past the dryness in his throat, he thought back to a month or so prior when the world still breathed with ease. When things were normal. Thoughts of waking up at six and wandering out the door, promising that he'd meet his friend Cody Lexington at the coffee shop two blocks from his apartment like he did every Thursday or Friday. He missed Cody. Frosted blonde hair and hazel eyes, an ever-aspiring artist who worked for some high standard company dealing in graphic design. He was thin and had sharp-looking teeth, always wore loose fitting clothes and rings in his peirced nose. He'd often made fun of Tyler for his hieght, to which he'd frequently replied 'well—It worked well enough for Frodo'. And Cody would chuckle and roll his eyes every time. They'd made quite the duo of friends, the writer with the visions of a painter and the artist with the heart of a poet. He was arbitrarily reminded that Cody had been the one to instigate the peircing of his own ears, giving him some 'the body is a work of art' gimmick. After enough drinks, Tyler came out with three peircings in each ear and a _very_ unwanted tattoo on his backside just above the tailbone. He'd woken up with a hangover the next day and had gone down to Cody's loft. He'd never yelled at anyone like that before in all his life, nor seen anyone laugh so hard. …It was funny that he could barely recall these memories until just now.

            "I was…Well I'm twenty-four. And I was a writer. Friends said I was a pretty damn good one." He felt himself say, smiling numbly for a moment. "I'd just moved to Milwaukee eight months before…it." And suddenly he was torn back down from his reminiscing by the reality surrounding him. It was cold and cruel rush that almost took his breath away. "That's me…I guess."

            "It was a nice city." Ana said, also seeming to be in the hazy mist of a repressed memory for a moment. "Great neighborhoods, at least where I lived, anyway."

            They could all feel the hollowness in her words, but they chose to say nothing. Mostly their attention was focused on Tyler, who they tried not to stare at. Each time they caught his gaze, they saw the same eyes that had mutilated their friends and loved ones, and unable to process his tranquility, they were forced to look away. Nicole seemed especially unwilling to acknowledge him, biting her lip and pressing her forehead against Terry's shoulder.

            "Uh, Tyler…" Ana began, and he could sense the change in her tone. Her averted eyes told him enough in regards to what she was after. "If you…well if you don't feel too uncomfortable about it, can we ask you about the past few days?"

            He'd been expecting it, really, but that didn't mean he was prepared to answer. Shaking his head submissively, he scratched his fingers through the scant beard on his chin. "Yeah…go ahead."

            She paused to gather her thoughts, looking down at her shoes. "You said…uh, you said that you got here on a boat, right?"

            "Yes."

            "So where is it now?" she glanced at the group, her demeanor suggesting to him that perhaps they had followed his tracks and searched for it. When they didn't find any boat, surely, he could see where they should be suspicious of him.

            "I don't know. Out there, somewhere." He waved a hand to the sea.

            "You didn't take it here?" Ana confirmed, awaiting an explanation.

            Tyler took a breath, wanting to get this over with as quick as possible. "No. We were on the boat when…well, when he changed."

            Kenneth sighed and Terry's eyes widened slightly, imagining that scene. "Your friend?" Kenneth asked.

            "Yeah." He nodded back. "We left the shore because we were attacked by those things. We didn't have a choice. I just can't believe I didn't see him get…get bitten."

            "And he attacked you then?" Ana continued.

            He felt like lashing out at that question. _What do you think?_ He thought, but as he looked down and saw the bandages on his arm, he softened, and was slightly ashamed at his own irritability. "We struggled…he fell overboard when I-I…"

            A long moment of dead air. "When you what?" Ana prodded.

            "I…cut off his head…threw it in the cooler…ugh, God…" at that, he put his sandwich aside for good and rubbed his head.

            Ana straightened up, giving the others a clearly surprised look. Could it be that they had almost crossed paths with him before? They had passed that boat…

            Tyler was oblivious to their recognition of his story, licking his upper lip before starting again. "He pulled me overboard. From there I swam."

            Ana felt compelled to offer condolences, but she couldn't find the words. She knew that when she watched Luis clawing for her blood, or when she had been forced to fire a shot into Steve's head (not that that particular moment bothered her entirely), no petty apologies made her feel any better about it. In some kind of attempt at compassion, she tenatively offered him a bottle of water from what supplies they had salvaged.

            Kenneth didn't take the same approach. "You're a helluva lucky kid." He muttered, absently tossing small wood chips into the dying embers.

            Tyler didn't say anything, reliving those agonizing moments when he had nearly drowned for the fear that his former travel-mate was still after him in the water. The taste of blood and saltwater heavy on his tongue, the pounding headache and dizziness, and the white flashes of pain on his many cuts and bruises all came back to him. "There are more on this island, aren't there? More dead." Tyler sighed, letting the memory go.

            Ana swallowed and mirrored his unhappiness at the thought. "Yes. Did you see any of them? Near here?"

            "No, I just…" he looked up at her. "Figured that we'd be somewhere else if there weren't…that's all."

            "I think it's pretty much safe to say that…nowhere's safe." She smirked with a tinge of resentment at that. She immediately thought better, however, realizing that she must be bringing down the spirits of the group. "Not yet, anyway." She added. "I mean not that we've found, at least."

            "I can't take this-" Nicole suddenly spoke out. The others looked to her in mild bewilderment, just now seeing the tears breaking over her eyes.

            Terry reached to her, only to receive a shove back.

            "I can't sit here and look at him anymore!" she yelled, holding a hand to her forehead.

            "Nicole…" Ana's mouth opened, unprepared for her outburst.

            "It's not right!" she countered. "Don't you see what he is? 'Did he _see _any of _them_ near here'? He _is_ one of them, Ana, _open_ your eyes!"

            "Nicole, calm down, don'-" Terry tried, but he was cut off.

            "Well I can't just sit here and wait for him to fucking _turn _on us!" she stood up.

            "Stop it, Nicole." Ana ordered boldly. "If he _were_ one of them, he would've tried to kill us last night."

            "Bullshit! If Kenneth hadn't had that gun to his head, he would've been on him in a second!" tears came down her cheeks, her face held in a scowl.

            "You know that's not true." Ana stood up as well, tossing a hand gesture in the direction of the gun near Kenneth's feet. "Zombies can't _think_, they can't reason. They're just big chunks of meat, that's all they are!"

            Nicole clenched a fist for a moment and gripped the sides of her head. "It's just wrong! Why the hell is he moving? Breathing? How the hell can he still be _talking_? Talking like he wasn't bitten—but he _was _bitten! _He was bitten_!"

            Tyler stared blankly, an eneffable sort of despair coming from him.

            "I don't know, but he _is_. If you want to ignore that and shoot him, well what the hell does that say about you?" Ana brushed off Kenneth, who was holding up a hand at her.

            "He should be _dead_!" Nicole sputtered, furiously wiping her tears with a sleeve. "He should've died! That's what happens when you're bitten: you _die_! Why is _he_ so special? Huh? Why is _he_ still alive and all of our friends are dead?"

            "I _don't know_." Ana repeated, shaking her head.

            "W-well what if he's not the only one, huh?" her voice of rage was quickly being overcome by sobs. "What if it was possible to live through being bitten and we just didn't know it?"

            "…Nicole, I…" Ana became sympathetic, a realization spreading over her.

            "What about my _dad_?…What about _him_? Why couldn't _he _have been that way? A-and what if he _was_, what if you just…" she turned away, "Killed him anyway?", before breaking down into sobs, storming off away from them.

            "Nicole!" Terry called out. "Stop it! You can't just go out there by yourself!" in a worried manner, he pulled himself up and shakily ambled after her.

            "God damn-" Kenneth grunted and he climbed to his feet. "-kids. Hey! Hey you two, get your scrawny asses back here!" he marched off after them.

            Ana put a hand to her head in exasperation as she watched a brash but concerned Kenneth jog after them, feeling yet again like she wanted to tear herself in two. _Again_ they were giving into emotional chaos, _again_ they sat poised on the edge of each other's throats. Here they were, falling apart at the seams when they needed eachother most and there was nothing she could do about it. She wanted to scream from the rage and frustration, cry from the misery and drudgery. But she couldn't. She wasn't allowed to show that she was weak as the rest of them. At least not when they still believed she was strong enough to handle it.

            "I'm…I'm sorry…" Tyler said, clutching his bandaged arm tightly in a masochistic moment of self-disgust.

            Ana turned back to him, almost having forgot that the argument was in regard to him in the first place. "Don't apologize." She said instantly, but it came out much harsher than she had meant it. "Don't…"

She ignored the fact that she felt a twinge of resentment when she glanced down at him. Above all things, she would _not_ allow hereslf to identify with Nicole's feelings…It wasn't his fault, after all, that he was still alive and talking—

…while Micheal was dead.

            _Author's Note: Okay, I know the way the group deals with him might seem sort of strange. After all, he's freaking been infected, shouldn't they be insanely paranoid? Well I'm basically taking the approach that they're sort of numb right now. In a state of shock, if you will. So when he acts human, they don't know how else to deal with him except for treating him as just that. Not that they're stupid, after all, none of them like the idea. I'm saying that they're attatched to him because he's human, but they're dettatched from him because he's not. I hope that sort of resembled some kind of sense… _


	8. Small Talk

**Talker** – Chapter Eight: Small Talk

_Author's note: Okay. Sort of short, rather a prelude to the next scene of events. Thanks for the reviews!_

Tyler set himself away from the group, within a satisfactory distance that he would not be spoken to but also close enough to keep an eye on. After the conversation that had taken place hours before, he said nothing, sitting to himself and resting his throbbing head down into his arms. Though Nicole had apologized to the group for her breakdown, she had refused to approach him personally, but whether that was out of embarassment, fear, or a general disliking for him, he did not know. Still, he remained dettatched through it all, and gave few things a second thought.

            It was because of this that he wasn't bothered when he was virtually ignored by the others. After all, he had gotten much the same treatment with Tom. Not that he would blame them for their apprehension. And as it stood, the group hung silent and scattered all the same. His arm did not bleed through its bindings, but his fingers were growing cold and he could not seem to warm them. His head spun through torrents of pain and dull buzzes of numbness, breaking his focus. It seemed to him that very little time had passed, though his world now darkened and the pale gray sky became a blackish void above him. He shivered.

            It was then that he felt the hand on his shoulder, and so unprepared was he for such an unconsciously tender gesture that he leapt away from it.

            "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you." Said Ana, quickly withdrawing the hand.

            He stared up at her for a moment with a breath of relief, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "No, I-I was just thinking."

            "Just wanted to see how you were doing out here." She informed, eyes falling onto his arm. "Everything okay?"

            "Sure." He said instinctively, flexing the fingers as if to prove himself.

            She took her eyes away from his arm and gazed back over her shoulder at the rest of the group. None of them looked at each other, all sitting in silence and staring off to nowhere like they didn't know anyone else was there. "I'm sorry about what happened earlier. It wasn't your fault, you know." She said, not meeting his eyes to see his response.

            "Nah, don't worry about it." He assured, scratching his head.

            "Well she didn't mean any of what she said, it's just that…we all lost someone. And we don't understand you."

            "Really, it's okay." Tyler said, standing with a good amount of effort. As he got to his feet, he swayed and almost fell over, but Ana snatched him by the front of the shirt and yanked him back up. "Uh-hah…whoah. Sorry." He chuckled warily, pushing himself up straight.

            "Are you sure you're okay?" she released him and checked him over with her eyes. "Was there anything you needed?"

            He stopped for a minute and looked down in thought, seeing the dried blood coating his shirt. "Actually…if you don't mind…" Ana waited. "Well I had a question."

            "Go ahead." She nodded.

            "You said that you…that you were a doctor, right?" he met her gaze, squinting slightly as a ray of setting sun struck his eyes.

            "Is something wrong?"

            "Um…it's my eyes, I-I think, anyway." He swallowed. She seemed uncomfortable. Was she going to have to be the one to tell him that his eyes weren't the same anymore?

            "Yes?" she continued anyway.

            "It was just a few days ago. I woke up and I was…color blind. Just like that. I was sort of hoping you could tell me something about that. Any…reason it would happen?" he shrugged hopefully.

            Her eyebrows raised a little and she looked like she was lost in thought. It took her some time to search back in her memory to being medical student, trying to pull her knowledge back from the edge of being discarded when it had no longer mattered. "And the color's completely gone? There's no traces of red or blue or anything else?"

            "No, it's gone." He said, holding a gray hand in front of his face. "Just black and white."

"Has it ever happened before?"

            "No."

            "What about the rest of your family? Do they have any history of it? Here, sit."

            He obeyed, sitting back down on the fallen tree husk he'd been secluded to. "Not that I know of. My grandmother was blind, but I don't think that's the same thing. She was in an accident."

            "And did you hit your head?" she put her hands on the sides of his head and began to examine him.

            "I don't remember. I guess I could've. Everything's kind of a blur…"

            "Let's see…" she bit her lip, checking for any kind of bruising. "Have you been sensitive to light lately? Nauseous?"

            "Mm. On and off." He agreed, looking down at her feet.

            "Like achromatopsia. It's pretty rare…I've only ever seen it show up through heredity." She gently pushed down on the side of his skull near his temple, seemingly disturbed. "Here…there's a depression. Tyler, you should remember if you'd been hit like this."

            "I don't remember very much of anything besides the last four or five days." He admitted.

            "Well this wound's been here for at least a week or more…" she sighed an removed her hold, sitting down next to him. He felt relieved somehow. He hadn't really expected her to be able to help him, just to be able to identify this problem. And she had, so for this he was grateful. "Um…let's see, well sometimes this kind of thing can just go away on its own. It could clear up in a few days, or it might take months or years. Otherwise, as far as I know, there's no cure."

            "Oh…that's…good news I guess." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I mean, I thought that it was permenant for sure."

            "Don't get your hopes up. It might be." She suggested, brushing some sand off her pant leg.

            "Yeah…"

            For a while, they sat in silence, two mere strangers with nothing in common save for the will to live and a similar location. It was a feeling they were both used to. Ana had been forced into former strangers' lives back at the mall, obligated to either get to know them and like them or go out of her mind. Tyler had only ever known Tom as nothing but a stranger, given that he offered so little of himself. But life clings to life, and in that sense, they had both learned simply to draw comfort from the presence of another human life, no matter how undesirable.

            Tyler was glad to be with these people, even if they didn't trust him. They still made the attempt at a forgotten civillity, and that alone made him feel at ease. Whatever the case, none of them were as unpleasant as Tom had been. But he had to wonder if it was selfish to feel good about anything in these circumstances. He took a glance at Ana and smirked to himself, stretching out one of his arms in front of him and sighing.

            "Could be worse." He said.

            Ana turned to him, confused eyes searching for a justification behind those words. Here sat a man that had been infected with an, until recently thought, undeniably fatal disease who was now suffering from fever, color blindness, malnourishment, dehydration, the loss of every loved one he had ever known and now sat on an abandoned island with few means of a pitiable survival in a dead world with the words, "could be worse" falling from his lips. She didn't understand such emotional immunity.

            Tyler smiled sheepishly and shook his head, flipping his hair from his eyes with a jerk of his neck and tossing up a hand. "Could be raining."

            Ana's eyes widened, and before she could stop it, she felt laughter shaking her sides. Both of them fell into a fit of muted chuckles, the mood of severity crumbling, each reveling in the fact that for the first time—in much too long a time—there was something to be laughed at. Even if it had a semi-morbid underlying theme.

            "Ana." Came a voice, and both sat up straight to face the speaker.

            Ana's smile immediately vanished and she looked up at Kenneth, almost as though she felt guilty about being anything but serious. "What's wrong?"

            Kenneth let out a breath and glanced over at Tyler. "The both'a you, come back to the group. There's somethin' we should talk about."


	9. Where There's a Will There's a Risk

**Talker** – Chapter Nine: Where There's a Will There's a…Risk

_Author's Note: Okay, I suppose I should explain some of Tyler's condition. Where did he hit his head? Well, we don't know. It's no big secret; he just hit it somewhere along the line and doesn't remember how. It might come up later. As for color blindness—well that's just caused by the head injury. It can happen. So I'll put it medically: sometime ago, (about a week by Ana's assumption) he suffered an injury to his head. He has mild amnesia of the events surrounding it due to that injury. A few days later, he lost the color in his vision, a gradual effect that can show up hours, days, or even weeks or months after the actual infliction. The moral being…head injuries are dangerous and weird!! Xx…Sorry for the confusion, I probably should've explained this earlier. _

            "I don't even know why you're arguing about it, I thought we already talked about this." Ana interupted, putting a hand to her head. "We can't just scout out to the middle of the island, that's suicide."

            "Well so is staying out here." Terry pointed out. Obviously Ana's unspoken reign of judgement had been broken by this point. "We're going to have to eventually, Ana, you know that's true."

            "And so we just march up there, the five of us? We need time, or preperation, or…or something more than two guns and a dog." She motioned to Chips, who looked up from his spot lying in the sand and wagged his tail once or twice.

            Tyler kept quiet to the side of them, considering their conversation curiously and nervously tapping his thumb against his leg.

            "So we sit here and starve?" Terry took a drink of watter and sighed. "We have to take some kind of risk. What are you suggesting that we _do_, anyway?"

            "He's right, Ana." Kenneth agreed. "We've gotta get out of here. One way or another."

            "Look, we have enough food and water to last us for a week or so. We should wait." She looked from Kenneth to Terry, folding her arms over her knees.

            "Why?" Terry shrugged in exasperation. "Why should we wait? So we can run out of food for sure?"

            "You can't use that arm very well, Terry. It needs some time to heal, and you can function best when we need you most. And the same goes for Tyler," she pointed over at him and he looked up. "He needs to keep eating and get over that fever, otherwise he won't even have the energy to keep up with us."

            There was an awkward pause at Tyler's mention, but Terry quickly covered. "Or maybe he'd do better if we found him some medicine." He countered, clearing his throat and looking briefly at Nicole. "Wouldn't you be able to fix him up better if we found some supplies? And my arm, too?"

            "We're in a shit situation." Kenneth broke in, holding out a hand. "And when it comes down to it, we really only got two options. Either we do somethin' about it or we don't. Personally, I'm all for doin' somethin'."

            "Well why do we have to rush into it just because it's an idea? We don't even know how far we'd have to go." She said as she watched Chips get up and wander off a ways to the treeline. She almost called out to tell him not to go out too far before she angrily reminded herself that he was a dog.

            "Well hold up now, we just might." Kenneth said. "When I went out there last night, I saw the top of some building coming up from a ways off. It's somethin', at least."

            Ana stopped, thinking for a moment. "About how far off?"

            "A mile. Maybe less."

            "It could be swarmed." She decided. "We'd go out there and if they didn't kill us there, they'd follow us back here."

            "Or there could be other survivors." Nicole muttered quietly.

            Ana sighed. "Am I really that outnumbered? I'm just trying to think of what's best for our health here."

            "Well I'm thinkin' of what's best for our lives." Kenneth disagreed, giving the dog a gruff pat as it rested its head on his knee. "Don't give a damn about how healthy we are so long as we're still breathin'. We need food and we need water. We ain't gonna find much a'that out here, you know that 'well as we do."

            "So then why don't two of us check it out first before we move everyone out at once? Will you at least give me that much?" Ana bargained, obviously irritated at this point.

            "No," Kenneth snorted, "who says just two can do it? What if those two get killed, and have the gun? What'll the rest of you do?" it was clear by that insinuation he had decided himself first in line for the position of a scout-out. "And what if the infected get back here while we're gone? We're just s'posed to leave you unprotected?"

            "We're not helpless. And weren't you just suggesting that we _should_ take a risk?"

            "I don't want the group seperated." Kenneth shook his head. "You've seen what happens when the group seperates, no matter how good the plan was."

            "Great, okay, so—no plan. And blind luck's a better thing to rely on?"

            "It's not luck, Ana," Terry stopped her. "We stay together and we stay alive. If we start making smaller groups, they'll just pick us off."

            "It doesn't matter how many of us there are, they're gonna be on us like flies all the same. They're not smart enough to pick us off; _they just swarm_. There's more of them than us, we get overrun no matter what. Our best chance is to avoid them."

            "Avoid them?" Terry leaned his cheek down on his palm. "Okay. Five on an island of a hundred and we just ignore them."

            "Don't simplify it like that, Terry, you know what I mean." She gave him a determined glare.

            "See Ana, there's the problem: I _don't_." his arm fell slack. "I don't understand why you want us to just run and hide from them, we can't do that forever."

            "What I _mean_ is that we shouldn't go looking for them. It's _stupid_, and it's belligerent."

            "Well we're out of options." Kenneth shrugged.

            "What's wrong with waiting? Just for a few days, even?" she stole a nervous glance at Tyler, who was studying them through burning golden eyes of the dead.

            "There's just as much risk in waiting as there is in going out there." Nicole said, eyes low. There was a long period of silence after her statement, each considering her point in a different manner. Ana sighed and rubbed her cheek with a desperate prayer that they would understand. She wouldn't be able to bear it if they all went out there and even one of them were killed. She couldn't watch another friend screaming in agony as they were torn down into a feeding frenzy. She couldn't look again at the remaining survivors and think _why me? Why am_ I _still alive?_

            "If we do go…we can't take everyone." Ana started, holding out a stiff hand like she was trying to get them to silence and hear the rest of her plea. "Think about it. Just think about it. What's the use if we all die? Kenneth, you're a cop," she said, looking at him. He straightened up, a mixture of despondant pride and suspicious curiousity at her words. "Okay, put it in the same situation if you were…I don't know, busting a crackhouse. Do you send every officer you have into the building or do you leave some for back-up? To guard the post?"

            "I ain't been a cop in a long time, Ana." He said darkly. "And ain't no situation ever been the same as this. I want each a'you exactly where you are now: where I can see you."

            "Well if you're so damn busy watching us, who's watching you?" she demanded.

            He didn't seem to know what to say to that, staring at her with a calculating expression and the others watching in hesitant wonderment. Ana could feel his internal conflict. He didn't care what happened to him, so long as the group was safe, but he knew he couldn't voice this because they would not agree. And damned if he was going to look like some ignorant hero.

            With a deep breath in, he shook his head and cracked his knuckles. "I wouldn't be the one staying behind. And I don't think any of _you_'d wanna be, either."

            Ana bit down on her lip, rubbing her arms gently despite the warmth of the island air. "Kenneth and I should go." She announced.

            At that, the group erupted into wayward scorn, all throwing out vehement protests.

            "_I_ should be going," Terry insisted, "You should stay, Ana, if something happens to the group, they'll need you."

            "What if something happens to _you_ while you're out there, which is a hell of a lot more likely? _You'll_ need a doctor then." She pointed out.

            "Well I'm not leaving Terry. If he goes, so do I." Nicole said indignantly.

            "That's just great, so we leave Tyler and the dog?" Ana scoffed.

            "No, Nicole and Tyler should stay behind." Terry decided. Nicole's eyes widened and she appeared horrified at that remark.

            "So there's your problem." Kenneth rose his voice to break the chatter. "No one wants to stay behind. You see that? Whatever we do, it's gonna have to be together."

            Ana seethed, clenching her fist against the palm of the other hand dropped between her knees. Kenneth was right. It was obvious how tightly the last few survivors clung to eachother, and it would be impossible to set them apart. They lived together, they struggled together, and it became increasingly apparent that they would die together one way or another. Nothing she said could sway them from that mentallity of unity, and it was both reassuring and damning at once.

            Kenneth took her silence to mean she had no rebuttle, and so he nodded gravely at the rest of the group. "Tomorrow morning. We'll take half our supplies, just in case. And everyone goes."


	10. Trying to Lighten Up

**Talker** – Chapter Ten: Trying To Lighten Up 

Author's Note: Semi-short chapter. More to come. Thank you again for the nice reviews. I think I'm actually going to finish this story. How strange, huh? (Not soon though…no no…there's more shit to deal with yet.)

"Tyler? You want something to eat?" Ana offered, approaching him where he sat alone near the edge of the trees. "…You shouldn't be out here alone, you know."

            Tyler looked up tiredly and regarded her with wary appriciation, taking a Power Bar from her hand. "Thank you." He muttered. "I'm alright. I was just…enjoying the view?"

            "I'm serious…I mean we don't know how close those things are to us. And you're sick. You should be lying down." She motioned back towards the haphazard camp site.

            He looked behind them up to the white fire, glowing in the dead light before he swallowed and turned up to face Ana. "No, I-I'd better stay out here."

            "Don't be stupid, just come up and lie down. We're not afraid of you." She insisted.

            With a sigh, his eyes found the stretch of the beach again, haunted by the ghost of recent memories and slaughtered-out hopes. "…yes you are…" he whispered lightly, knowing that she would be anxious if he ignored her. "Christ, _I'm_ afraid of me…"

            Ana thought of what he said for quite some time as she sat down near him. She knew exactly what he meant. …And she _was_ afraid of him, even if she felt like an idiot to admit it. "What do you think about tomorrow?" she changed subjects, still aware of the numb sort of shock he seemed to be in since they found him.

            "I don't know…" he answered honestly.

            Another long press of silence before Ana continued. "Do you think we should go up there?"

            He made an effort to respond, but in the end just settled for a vague shrug.

            "Well I guess you already know what _I_ think." Ana spoke, looking down at her hand and playing idly with some small, pronged twig. "What I really want to know is…if you're up to traveling. I don't want you to have to struggle to keep up."

            He hesitantly nodded, scratching his thin beard roughly. "I'll do my best not to slow you down."

            She felt her stomach drop at that statement, a bitter kind of guilt from the fact that he had taken her concern to be a warning. "Well…we'll do our best to protect you."

            He glanced at her a moment and opened his mouth as if to speak, but he said nothing. Instead he just stared down at his nutrition bar, looking like he was perhaps trying to read the ingredients. She sincerely hoped he wasn't worrying about his weight at a time like this.

            "You know, the others were probably right." She attempted to sway him with some kind of optimism, wanting to raise spirits when it was needed so much. "It wouldn't be that long a walk to make it to the resort… or whatever it was that Kenneth saw. I'll bet they have Tylenol, that'll take down your fever."

            "Yeah. Maybe." He humored her, fumbling with the wrapper. "And running water…"

            "And shaving cream." She half pointed to his wirey chin hair, rousing a smile from him.

            "God, I hope so." He opened the Power Bar and stared at its thick, rubberish texture.

            "I'm already starting to miss beds." She said, recalling the luxuries of the mall and watching him take a bite. Or try to.

            "These thingsrr…impossible t'chewr." he muttered as he tore a chunk off in his teeth.

            "They taste like cardboard, but it's about all we have. Unless you'd actually like some cardboard." She semi-jested at his plight.

            Tyler snorted and grit his teeth against the grainy substance. "Don't know. Which one's better for you?"

            "Probably about the same." She kicked a small mound of sand lazily and inadvertantly covered a small nearby sand crab. In brief horror, she brushed the sand away quickly with the tip of her foot and was relieved to find the crab unharmed. She felt foolish, but was so unwilling to see death again that even this small creature was a survivor to her. The disturbed crab took a moment to pluck its legs out of the sand before it wandered on without incident and she watched it distantly.

            "So…just…out of curiousity…" Tyler began, not having noticed her encounter with the crab. "How much ammunition do you have?"

            Ana was surprised to hear his interest, and she thought about the question for a moment. "I don't really know. Not much…hopefully enough. We've got a hand gun and a shotgun and those are going to have to last us until we can find something else."

            "And what've you got besides that?"

            She paused. "Our legs."

            He smiled weakly and bowed his head, pulling out a wayward strand of hair from his scalp. "Alright…just curious…"

            "Well we've gotten out of worse." She decided confidently, unwilling to give in to another silence. "They're stupid and they're clumsy—and they don't know what they're doing."

            "Well they've already killed everyone. So what does all that count for?" he said flatly, eyes unfocused and tone calm.

            Ana opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out. She hadn't expected him to say that and she suddenly felt like a damn fool. How ignorant her words sounded at a second glance. Had she really assumed he was just stupid? Before she could help it, she felt tears gathering in her eyes and she looked down angrily, infuriated that she could be so pathetic. He'd only said a few words, and they weren't hurtful. Yet somehow they hurt anyway.

            It seemed that what he had said had only just now occurred to him, and Tyler jumped a little, looking up. "Oh, Ana, I-I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to say that, I didn't think-"

            "No, no, it's fine." She surprised herself by the façade of cheer in her voice. When she looked up again, she had successfully demolished her tears.

            "I'm sorry…I shouldn't've said that, I just…" he shook his head.

            "Don't apologize." She said, those words feeling strangely familiar.

            He almost apologized again merely for that, but instead let out a short stutter and went back to staring into the sand. _You're a real dumbass, Tyler. Did you forget that or something?_ He thought regretfully. He could feel how his bitterness stung her. These people tried so hard to keep a positive mood and here he had selfishly abolished their efforts with his own petty despair. The facts didn't need to be pointed out; the situation was clear.

            "…Tyler?" Ana spoke, standing up slowly.

            "Yes?" he looked up at her hopefully, willing to please if perhaps he could redeem himself from guilt.

            "Come on. Come get some sleep." She motioned behind her.

            "No I… I couldn-"

            "Hey look," she put her hands on her hips casually, sucking in a breath. "if you stay out here, _I_ won't be able to sleep. Do you want to be responsible for that? 'Cause I'm gonna give you a lot of hell in the morning if you do. Come on." She gestured for him to get up.

            "O-okay." He nodded, forcing himself up. "Sorry, I didn't mean to make you worr-"

            "Hey," she cut him off at his apology.

            "Uh, right, sor…yeah." He gave a tired kind of grin that looked more like a grimace as he followed her back up to the circle.


	11. Expedition

            **Talker **– Chapter Eleven: Expedition

__

_Author's Note: Things heat up. Oo_

Tyler didn't sleep much, in response to his now heavy fever and the maddening shifts between freezing cold and blistering heat washing over his body. His eyes would open breifly and he'd catch glimpses of a black sky or sometimes his companions before a bout of dizziness or nasuea would knock him out again. He supposed that he must've been drawing some attention the way the dog continuously moved from its spot and began licking his face. Seeming to sense his stress, Chips settled for lying down next to him, nose pushed into his shirt. Tyler wasn't lucid enough to register the act, his head pulsating and his stomach tossing back and forth as his fingers sifted rigidly through the sand beside him. Nothing existed outside of his pain and discomfort for quite some time.

            At last, after hours of frequently disturbed semi-rest, morning came, but he couldn't bring himself to open his eyes again to the painful blinding sunlight, even when he heard the others shifting from their places. Waking up was becoming a more and more agonizing task each day, sapping away his dying energy. He wondered, this time, if he would even be able to will himself ot move at all. Then he felt paws on his back, and a tongue running sloppily through his hair in a repeated enthusiasm. He jerked, putting a hand up to his head. "Hey-hey, come on, dog…"

            "Chips!" Ana's voice came from a few feet away. "Get off of him!"

            He felt the claws in his back lift and the jingling of tags fade out. Around him were the low voices and shuffles of the others, speaking about something he didn't catch as they loaded up what little supplies they had. He didn't want to have to try and get up, but the sound of Kenneth cocking the shotgun brought him jolting out of his daze whether or not he meant to. Pushing his palms into the sand, he heaved his body up and tried hesitantly to focus the world before him. His eyes stung when he looked up.

            "Sorry. Sorry, I didn't think he would bother you." Ana apologized, seeming to forget her own rule about apologies as she glanced at Chips.

            "S'okay." He nodded, sitting up in a sore manner. His muscles all seemed to be tightening at once.

            "Well it's time t-…" she paused, peering down at him oddly. "T-Tyler, your…uh, your eyes are bleeding…" she informed, her face momentarily pale.

            "My _eyes _are bleeding?" he straghtened up and touched his face, bringing back droplets of blood from the corners of his eyes.

            "It's okay, it's just…um, come on up and wash your face. We're heading out." She leaned her weight onto the opposing foot and studied him carefully.

            He cleared his throat, blinking harshly and feeling the uncomfortable burn of dried flakes of blood in his eyes. It took him a moment to gather himself and try to stand, though he had noticable trouble. Ana reached out to help him, but he refused, defiantly getting himself up straight again. 

            Stumbling down to the edge of the water, Tyler dipped his hands in, vigorously rubbing the sand and blood away from his face with a shudder. The sickness would have to fade eventually, he reassured himself. It always got a little better come midday. Though that didn't change the fact that he felt like a gutted trout at the moment, and he prayed for something to make the feeling leave him. He wanted to throw up and get rid of the gurgling pain in the pit of his stomach, but a fearful paranoia told him not to. He wasn't sure, after all, exactly what he would be bringing up, so instead he settled for taking in some slow breaths and diminishing the urge quickly.

            It was then that he caught his reflection in the water. Once the wild rippling settled, he was staring back at a face he no longer remembered having ever existed. Not that it wasn't familiar, not that he did not know it was his, but somehow, along the way, he had become so absorbed within himself that he had completely forgotten he had some kind of outward visage. That he was more than a troubled mind, that he was also a man. But in that water, the creature he was staring at, it was him. Undeniably just Tyler. He didn't even notice the awkward facial hair or the strange feral eyes with which he observed himself, nor did it matter to him that the image was distorted by the water's movement. He was real. _This_ was real. This entire damned world around his head was real, just like that cold reflection. Immediately after the realization, he swiped a hand through the water to destroy the image he saw, purging his mind of the rising emotions. He pushed them down, pushed them away, and pushed himself back onto his feet without another thought to the remorse he didn't have a right to.

            He could feel the eyes on him as he re-entered the group, and it made him far more nervous. Now he remembered what they were looking at, and he had quickly become self-conscious.

            "…Are you okay?" Ana asked in a hushed tone as he came past her.

            He nodded softly and hid his eyes, afraid she may be able to see the hurt in them. "Just tired. Fever's takin' it outta me I guess."

            She seemed concerned, but said nothing of it. "Alright." She handed him a sandwich without another word, subconsciously ordering him to eat. He felt a little hungrier, so he did, taking up large mouthfuls as he watched the others make a crude assemble near him.

            "We ready?" Kenneth glanced around. "How 'bout it, Tyler?"

            He almost choked on his food, but managed to give a muffled 'mm-hm'.

            "Well there's a path up this way closest to the beach. It should get us there. Come on, Terry's already half-way gone. Better catch him before we lose him." Kenneth motioned a hand and lifted his gun up, ready and willing to lead the way.

             Understandably, the group remained rather quiet as they headed out, Tyler only catching a few mutters between Kenneth and Terry every so often. The trees were suprisingly thick for having come such a short way off the beach, and they all nervously studied their surroundings at a slow pace to ensure nothing hid amongst them. Out here, there were no means of security but slight ammunition and the instinct to run, and they were every bit sure that they would have to make good use of both of them in order to survive. As soon as they left the site of their temporary camp, he could feel the group tense and leap to their guard, all confident, but anxious at the same time. Even the dog kept a tight pace with them, trotting ahead only a few feet before it would turn, hesitate, and wander back to Nicole's side. Tyler himself wanted no part in another skirmish with the same creatures that had infected him, but convinced himself that he was no coward. With each footstep he took, he felt more and more that he could fight if it was needed. It was a good feeling, one that made him feel alive again.

            He took quick glances at the members of the group, wondering briefly if any of them had doubts about doing this. He knew that Ana did, naturally. And though he would not admit it for fear of causing further disagreement, he felt rather uneasy about this as well. But what could be expected? They were walking out into an infected island barely armed and weakened, shouldn't fear be his natural response no matter how well-thought-out this was? Perhaps, but the feeling of discomfort remained. Kenneth was more than a master at banishing all emotion from his face, showing utterly no signs of falter in either his expression or his sure stride. Terry was clearly a little bothered by the whole situation, but in truth he was brave, and displayed his determination well. Nicole was half-distraught, but she covered her fear, and seemed to him to be equally set in her way. Ana, however, was nearly as difficult to read as Kenneth. Had he not already known that she protested to this trip, he might've almost guessed that she was completely at ease.

            He wondered now how he must've looked to them, but put more thought into the fact that they most likely weren't looking at him. They were all concentrating on the task at hand; focusing on their surroundings and the right way to go. _And why aren't _you_, by the way?_ He asked himself, pondering as he stared at the sand. (For an arbitrary moment, he suddenly wished that he still had shoes.) Maybe he just supposed that there was nothing he could add to their effort. He wondered what exactly he _would_ do if and when they were attacked. At the moment, quite honestly, he wasn't sure. Maybe he would just freeze up like a deer, that seemed to be his useless specialty whenever in a bad situation. Whatever the case, he didn't know why the group would risk taking him along at all. Ana's words from the previous night echoed back to him— _"we'll do our best to protect you."_— but he couldn't be sure the rest of the group felt so good about keeping him out of trouble. He already knew that Nicole wasn't too happy about having him around…

            …They had been walking for some time now, still in relative silence. The sun had risen higher and the island began to heat up, but the tension among them hadn't lifted. No one had spoken for quite a while, and the others were somewhat shocked when Kenneth stopped short. Immediately the group went on alert, looking at him with expectation. "What is it?" Nicole asked.

            "Look here." He waved out his hand, glancing at Ana. "Looks like we're close to somethin'. Tire tracks."

            The others looked, and sure enough, there lay a set of tracks through the sand. A few days old at least judging from the way it looked like the wind had eroded them down.

            "Well let's go." Kenneth seemed to regret having stopped them at all in the interest of the amount daylight they had, despite that fact that whatever they were looking for couldn't have been too far off.

And it wasn't.


	12. Checking In

**Talker** – Chapter Twelve: Checking In

_Author's Note: Have a nice day._

The group was surprised when, in only a matter of minutes after their find, they stood facing a completely different scene. Ana had been right: it was indeed a resort, or at least it once had been. A large building made from wood and shrowded floral decoration lay before them, a tired and empty looking piece of scenery that seemed to be a mere ghost awaiting the arrival of guests who were sure to never come. There was a long pause while they took it in, unsure that it could be truly as abandoned as it looked. Chunks of wood from some unknown torn up structure lay strewn across the sand, chewed up and bloodstained like they had been clawed at by human hands in some desperate frenzy. It was clear that this place had been hit by an attack, but whether or not there would be survivors seemed very doubtful by this point.

After only a glance around, they had found where the tire tracks had come from. An old jeep sat near the edge of the end of the path, the girth of a palm tree's base embedded into its front end like a knife wedged into a stick of butter. A blackened human arm stil leaned onto the wheel, dead fingers resting on it and its gored stump sitting on the seat, a gruesome last clutch on life. The vehicle appeared to have been burnt, and the passenger side door had been torn clean away. Obviously it was rendered unusable judgung purely from its demolished look. Aside from the severed limb, however, there was no sign of human or corpse existence in view, and so they cautiously came into the clearing towards the front of the building. Kenneth, after a long ponder on the deceased vehicle, had his gun raised defensively as he moved, straying from the group and wandering towards a pile of debris in the sand. A long tarp lay on the ground, one which would have been used to cover a boat in normal circumstances. Dried, dead palm leaves lay on top of it along with a good deal of sand, and Kenneth examined it just to be safe.

"Be careful." Ana called out needlessly, looking down as Chips growled.

Kenneth paused, then lifted the end of the tarp with his boot. No sooner had his foot been raised then a creature sprang from underneath it, a snarl chittering out from its teeth in a furious attack. He cried out and fell back a step, grabbing what he now realized was some kind of disturbed rodent-like ferret animal by the middle off his ankle and tossing it a good ten feet away. Chips burst into a barking riot, leaping forward and tearing after it at top speed.

"Chips!" Nicole yelled. After a few moments of the dog having vanished, he quickly emerged back into the clearing, panting as he went back to his master. "You dumb mutt." She sighed in relief.

"Looks like that weasel gave him what's for." Terry chuckled, bending down and looking over a bleeding puncture wound near his muzzle that looked to be caused by miniature claws. Chips barked proudly.

"I think he got the better of Kenneth." Ana mocked, amused to see how flustered he'd been.

"Okay, so the place looks clear." Kenneth muttered, shaking the sand out of his pant leg. "Remind me to look for some rat poison…"

As they came upon the door, Kenneth kicked some broken wood out of the way and jerked it opened, peering in at the darkened room with his gun ready. With a shove, he hurled the door the rest of the way open and walked in, motioning for the others to follow. Inside the building was about as poor off as the outside, the front desk broken and splintered while furniture lay toppled across the lobby, desolate and eerie. Above their heads, an unattended wood ceiling fan still spun slowly, making a nearly inaudible crik every few seconds that made them all jump just slightly. "Well let's have a look." Kenneth stepped forward. Before his foot even hit the ground, however, something exploded from the dark hall behind the main desk, shrieking like a scalded tea kettle. All that could be seen was a wild mash of bloody limbs all racing towards its new desire with a giddy rage before the final moment.

A shot rang out with a near deafening shatter and the others reeled back in time to see the corpse's head snap back as a bullet tore from under its chin to its brain. A heavy crash shook the floorboards as it hit the ground, spraying up a shower of blood and dust and the body not so much as twitching afterwards. Kenneth stood partially in shock, gun still raised and barrell still smoking as he looked down at the disheveled zombie that had come within a mere foot of him. Flecks of blood covered his chest, dribbling down his shirt and the length of the gun. Lowering it, he turned back to the others. "…So uh…like I said." He backed up and, with some effort, turned his attention to the desk, digging around in the drawers.

The others shook off their surprise and followed suit, by this point not too dazed when it came to narrowly escaping death. There really wasn't a use for letting fear absorb them for a moment longer than what was needed. They all spread out over the area of the lobby, turning over furniture to move it from their path and eyeing the staircase that they had yet to dare and venture up. "Ken!" Terry shouted from across the room, holding up a box of bullets. He tossed them in the large man's direction, who caught them high and brought them down to examine the contents.

"That's great, Terry, but these aren't for a shotgun." He said in dismay.

"They don't have to be." He replied, holding up a handgun. "Here."

"Let's just hope this place has a few more firearms held up in here." Kenneth nodded in approval.

"Well how long are we planning on being here?" Ana asked aloud, taking the gun from Terry and opening the chamber to see if it was loaded. "How long are we going to assume it's safe?"

Kenneth shrugged, resting his gun down at his side. "Why not the night?"

The others paused in response, their initial reaction to protest something as radical, but letting the thought sink in a moment.

"Stay here?" Ana voiced the thought first, awaiting an explanation.

"Yeah." Kenneth looked around. "If there were any more stiff bastards around here, they would've been on us by now."

"We've only been here a few minutes, what makes you think they won't eventually find us here?" she handed the gun back to Terry and took a step back, almost tripping over Tyler, who she now realized was right next to her.

"What makes you think they won't eventually find us out on the beach? At least here we have shelter." Kenneth argued. "Some kind of cover. And it's a pretty good vantage point."

Ana sighed and looked down, brow furrowed. After a moment of thought, she turned to Terry, who shrugged. "Well…he's got a point, Ana."

"I guess so…" Ana relented. "I don't know, something about this just doesn't feel right."

Kenneth considered her concern and straightened up, picking up his gun again. "Well we'll check upstairs; all the rooms. Take extra care makin' sure this place is safe."

"Sounds good." Terry chided, loading the newly discovered handgun and looking up at the broken steps.


	13. Reminders

**Talker** – Chapter Thirteen: Reminders

_Author's Note: Okay. Well I have this story planned out until the very end, so if you think it's getting boring, let me know. Now when we last left our little group, they were just deciding to take a vacation…_

It began to rain in the evening, but they didn't take much notice to it. Much of the day was spent searching each room carefully, prodding around at the items left behind by terrorized tourists and vacationers alike to see if they could be of any use. After only a few hours, the group was freely split up and scattered throughout the resort lodgings, actually at points talking and joking with each other again. So high did their level of security reach, in fact, that by nightfall, they had reached some unspoken consesnes that they would all choose whatever room they felt and stay there for the night.

By this point, Tyler sat alone in the room he chose, having seperated early from the group in light of his own unresponsiveness. Not that he wasn't pleased to be here as opposed to the out-in-the-open beach, but he did not feel excitement or a sense of happiness that the others seemed to be feeling. He was still rather numb, he supposed. The room he had chosen was very nice, but obviously had not been used prior to the disasterous incident judging by the lack of personal possesions. He rather liked it that way. The kind of room he never would've bought out if under usual cirsumstances. For the first time in a long time, he almost felt normal again. After all, he was in a modern place with living human beings, and for at least now, there was little in them that suggested that they had been exposed to the horrors he knew they had been. He had every reason to feel better. He'd even found some good shoes that fit pretty well—thank God. The mood was light, even if he himself was not participating. He felt regretful about that, he hadn't meant to be so outwardly distant. Looking back, he saw that he had barely uttered a word, which must have made them feel uncomfortable to say the least. The irony was that, now that he was away from their company, he found himself missing them.

Which was why he felt a certain sense of relief when Ana came suddenly barging into his room with only the quickest of knocks. "Hey, Tyler." She greeted, drifting into his dark quarters and looking around. "What's up?"

He smirked at the question, looking down and rubbing the back of his neck. "Not much. I'm just tired."

"Well I brought you some things." She came forward, placing a pile of clothes into his lap where he sat. "There were some clothes in the dresser in my room. Thought you could use some."

"Thank you." He looked down at them, the thought of finally changing out of his bloodstained attire another great relief. Maybe now he wouldn't look like so much of a zombie. White T-shirt and black pants (or at least he assumed they were, it was dark and light all the same), along with some socks and boxers. Boxers with chili peppers on them, no less. "…I should get cleaned up. This place have running water?"

"For now. No hot water though, careful if you were thinking about a shower." She warned.

"I think a cold shower'd feel good about now…" he glanced at the bathroom.

"Oh, I also found this." She held out a box, and he took it inquisitively.

"Tylenol." He smirked.

"Fever reducer. Knock back a couple before you turn in." she said as she flipped on a lamp.

"Whatever you say, Doc." He downed two pills instantly and tossed his clothes onto the bed, standing up.

"I was going to go down and find something to eat. You wanna join me?" she crossed her arms and awaited his answer.

"Nah, thanks." He smiled breifly. "I was gonna chance a shower. Maybe a shave."

"Okay. Want me to bring you anything?" she offered, turning back to the door.

Tyler almost declined out of modest habit, but he paused, thinking for a minute. "Well…hey, I don't suppose this place has coffee?"

"Coffee?" she laughed. "It's late."

"It's been a while." He mused, looking down at the memory of the coffee house he and Cody used to visit. Tall double mocha latte, two sugar, touch of nutmeg, low fat cream. Had he really been that picky?

"I'll find some instant decaf." She chuckled, shaking her head and disappearing into the dark hallway.

With a sigh he took his clothes and ambled into the bathroom, flicking on the light. It was a large bathroom. Lots of flowers, lots of trashy decorations. And thankfully, lots of soap. God, he'd missed soap. He knew he looked like he needed it, too. He spent a great deal of time in front of the mirror at that thought, caught in a trance as he stared at his beaten and bruised form. His eyes were…horrible. He'd seen these eyes in his attackers, but never really thought he was looking out from them. It shocked him something awful and it took him a long moment to calm his breathing in recovery. He almost felt a little lucky that he couldn't see in color. Even so, he could see how pale his skin was, despite having spent so much time in the sun. He did look like a corpse.

As he stripped away his shirt and turned on the shower, he looked in disdain at the grit on his body. His feet were cut up, sand was always falling from his hair no matter how many times he shook it, and the blood and dirt had formed a kind of gruesome paste against his skin. Bruises did indeed cover his shoudlers and chest, testaments to Tom's final struggle with him. In some places, the skin had broken and trails of blood ran out of them. He didn't want to think about those moments, though. They didn't matter. It was just now, now was what he could deal with. He was halfway into unbandaging his arm when he realized that it was still bleeding, and this turned his thoughts. That realization made him rather nervous, but he pretended to ignore this as well and tossed the used gauze aside without another glance down.

The water _was_ cold. As soon as it hit his skin, he drew a sharp inward gasp and immediately became enveloped in small shivers. He found washing himself no easy task to boot, as though it were a thing he'd simply forgotten to do under the layers of shit he'd had to think through recently. Normalcy had become a foreign thing to him. It felt good to wash his face, he remembered that much. Finally to get the blood and sand out of his eyes and to rid the sweat from his brow almost gave him the feeling that his fever was lifted away. Almost.

He was shaking bad by the time he got out, clutching at a towel and rubbing his face into it hard. When he looked back into the mirror, he felt satisfied with the improvement. Skin free of dirt, eyes clear. Then he felt a little self-conscious about looking at himself naked in the mirror and quickly pulled his clothes on. After that, he searched around and found a razor, with which he scraped away most of the loose hair on his face. He left a slight beard behind, mostly to cover a gash on his chin that he had not realized was there. At that, he felt much more at ease with his appearance. He still looked like a cadaver…but…a civil cadaver.

He found Ana in his room as he came out, the unexpected sight of her causing him to jump like a pin-pricked cat and freeze.

"Whoa, sorry." She apologized, seeing him jolt.

He could only stare for a moment, trying to shake away his unecessary shock. It was just Ana, just Ana, another person, no one to be afraid of. "Y-yeah, I'm just a little, uh…on edge." He managed over the noise of his pounding heart. He took in a breath and flicked some of his wet hair out of his face, now realizing that he was still dripping.

She was sitting in one of his chairs, casually eating spoonfuls of what looked like applesauce. "Found you coffee." She muttered, mouth full.

Gratefully, he went over and picked up the steaming cup, looking down into it with mild wonder. "Thanks. Really, I mean it." He took a drink and sat down on his bed.

"You look good." She decided after a lengthy glance over him as though he were something to be read.

He looked up with an indignant blush touching the bridge of his nose before he laughed weakly. "I look like hell."

She shrugged and kept eating. "You look hungry, actually."

He absently gnawed on the rim of his cup, eyes blurring as he absorbed the dull glow of the lamp. "Mm. Stomach's not so good."

She sighed, eyes drifting to the wooden shutters of his window and listening to the drizzle of dying rain outside. As if to prevent a break in conversation, thunder rolled distantly to announce the end of a minor tropic storm. "Can I…ask you something?" she said quietly, almost like she hoped he wouldn't hear her.

"Yeah. Anything." He nodded. He had a vague kind of idea as to what she wanted to ask him about.

She didn't say anything for a while after that, staring off into nowhere as she slowly set her bowl down into her lap. "Does it hurt? What it's done to you?"

It was now his turn for an awkward pause. He may have expected it, but he didn't know what to say. He didn't even know himself—between the fever and the bloodloss he couldn't say for sure what was because of his infection and what was because of other causes. It hurt him phsycologically, he supposed, but he wasn't about to get teary and pitiful. She was a doctor, not a therapist. "No." he decided. He knew what she was hoping.

She smiled breifly, looking down. He didn't know what she was thinking now. Maybe she was just accepting his lie gently, maybe she had bought it and it had at least brought her a moment of peace. "Good." She murmured softly. He wondered sadly what kind of ghosts were haunting her. It was at that point it came to him he knew almost nothing about her, or any of his saviors, for that matter. "I'm sorry, Tyler, it's probably insensative for me to ask."

"Hey, we've all got our problems…especially now. Hm." He took another drink. "Besides. I thought you said I was lucky. You know?" he smiled and looked up.

"You are, I-" she stuttered, fumbling for a minute. "I-I just meant that…Well you can't be-"

"It's okay. Really." He chuckled. He could feel a dumb smile still on his face, strangely placid. "Sure this is…decaf?" he put a hand to his head.

"Yes." She studied him, concern melting into amusement. "Wow. Those pills must be working wonders on you."

"What?" he grinned. "No. I'm fine. I just like coffee. A lot."

"What, did you get a buzz off of Tylenol? Look at you, you're practically purring." She tried not to laugh, standing up.

He couldn't stop himself from yawning. "Maybe. Maybe a little."

She rolled her eyes and stretched out her back, setting her bowl on a side table and went over to him, taking away his cup. "You could really use some sleep."

"Yeah." He felt a heavy sweep of tiredness just for having uttered that word. He should have looked for that 'may cause drowsiness' label before he took those pills. "That might be nice."

She nodded with a smirk, going to the door and flicking off the lamp. "Goodnight, Tyler."

His eyes momentarily explored the dark, a comforting numbness growing in his muscles. "Night, Ana. Thanks again…" the door closed, and he fell back against the sheets of the bed. A number of thoughts occurred to him as he lay there. That he should probably brush his teeth, or that he should see what time it was, trivial things, really. He didn't have energy in the end to do these things anway, and before he knew it, even the calming tap of rain had faded out in his ears.


	14. Knock At the Door

**Talker **– Chapter Fourteen: Knock At the Door 

            _Author's Note: Ah, yes. The soothing sound of rainfall…Come on, guys! Why so suspicious? Maybe everything will just work out for them from this point on…=D_

His chest jolted and his eyes were open already, even before he was conscious. What had woken him up? Something in him or something around him? Confused, but completely alert, he looked frantically around him to try and locate the cause of his sudden awakening. He was sitting up, just beginning to calm back down and tell himself it was nothing more than a pointless dream when a loud crash brought him rigid out of his relaxation. Downstairs. Something was happening downstairs. He leapt out of bed, tumbling out the door and running straight into the railing of the stairs, looking down to hear the door practically bursting from its hinges. Something—and he had a pretty good idea as to what—was pounding on the other side of the it, and had to have been moving even the heavy sofa they'd pushed in front of it as an extra precautionary measure in order to do so.

He looked to the side as Terry came stumbling out of his room with Chips at his side, eyes wide as he searched the area. "What's going on?" he cried, voice a little less than confident as he spotted Tyler.

He opened his mouth to yell to him, but it was just then that a tremendous crunch was heard, and it was assumed that the door gave way under the arms of screaming undead. "Shit! Run!" Tyler cried, waving his arms.

"Where!?" Terry sputtered for a minute before Ana and Nicole were suddenly out in the hall as well, Nicole bumping right into Terry and startling him into words. "They've gotten inside, get out!" he motioned for the two women to follow him.

"What the hell-" Kenneth came storming out of his room, but was caught without his gun for once, looking around in momentary confusion at his companions before he shook his head. By some pre-ordained grace of nature, he had always been a fast-thinker and a level head. "Hurry it up, get down the damn stairs before they trap us up here."

"I know a way out. There's a side door." Ana said, boldy running down the stairs. Unwilling to let Ana go alone, Nicole was suddenly after her, along with the ever-faithful dog.

"Ana, wait!" she chirped.

"Nicole!" Terry unsuccessfully tried to call her back. He nearly went after them, but just as they had gone, there were faces at the bottom of the stairs.

"Damn it!" Kenneth cursed as he leaned over the railing. The lodge was quickly becoming overrun. He turned back to see if they could escape down a second set of stairs that was located at the opposite end of the hall, only to find that, to his horror, the corpses had beaten them to it. They'd gotten upstairs, and the remaining group was surrounded at both ends.

There was no choice, they had to get down somehow. Luckily, Terry still possessed his handgun tucked into the band of his shorts in an unadmitted paranoia, and it was loaded. Just now realizing this, he pulled it out and readied himself to shoot.

"Just run!" Kenneth screamed, backing up as a screeching zombie came straight for him.

"Kenneth!" Terry shouted, but before he could react, Kenneth had grabbed the corpse and tossed it back a good ways with the better part of his strength. He quickly turned and made his way towards Terry, grabbing Tyler by the shirt and thrusting him out of harm.

Terry fired three shots at the creatures coming up from the stairs closest to them, hitting one in the head and two in the chest. They crumbled back down the stairs in shock, but did not deter their followers. There was a gap, however, between them and the others as they rolled heedlessly to the floor below. Enough to make and escape through.

"Come on, quick! We gotta get to the others!" Kenneth headed down the stairs while it was temporarily clear, Terry and Tyler right behind him. For the moment.

Before Terry set foot down the stairs, hands grabbed at him, tearing him back and slamming him to the wall in a blurry smear of pain. The gun flipped out of his hand and hit the first step, firing a shot into a wall. "Ahh!" Terry shoved at the gnarled zombie that was gnashing its teeth at him, using his knee to push the creature in the stomach and trying to pry its hands off his shirt.

It somehow didn't even occur to Tyler to go for the gun. He felt a foreign surge of a pure, primal instinct as he leapt forward towards the scene. Almost against his own will to act, he grabbed the zombie around the neck with both arms and tore it away from Terry with a strength he knew was not his own and a growl that was anything but human, hurling it to the wooden floor with a crash. It's head broke open and spit a variety of nasty fluids, but it was quickly scrambling to its feet again. Tyler was moving back to Terry and the stairs when a mob of ghouls knocked him straight to the ground.

"Tyler!" Terry made an angry move forward, but a hand from the stairs caught him by the arm and yanked him down. He looked up to see Kenneth, nearly striking out at him as he did so.

"Move it!" Kenneth ordered, dragging him down.

"Wait! Tyler's stil-!" Terry pulled against his grip.

"We can't save him, kid, come _on_!" Kenneth was bordering on pleading, using his brute strength as an advantage to force the younger man down the stairs. Begrudgingly, Terry frettfully obliged.

Ana was frantically looking around, horrified that here companions were no longer behind her. Nicole stood with the door half-open, frozen in midstep as her fear increased wildly around that same fact. "Where are they? What's taking them so long?" she began to panic.

Ana felt a cold grip on her stomach, knowing that they couldn't stand here much longer but unable to leave when three of her fellow survivors still hung back.

Kenneth and Terry came bursting back into the lobby, Terry running to meet Nicole immediately and Ana crying out in something that she couldn't quite dicern as either shock or relief. "What are you waiting for? Get the fuck out of here!" Kenneth demanded as he went for the door.

"Where's Tyler?" Ana felt an icy dagger in her lungs and continued looking at the entrance to the lobby, backing up slightly.

"Come on, Ana! We've gotta go before this place fucking collapses on us!" Kenneth shouted at her, turning back.

"Not without him!"

"Damn it, Ana, we don't have a choice!" Kenneth had a note of sympathy in his voice, but his hand found her arm roughly all the same and forced her out the door with them.


	15. Right Back to Nothing

**Talker** – Chapter Fifteen: Right Back to Nothing 

_Author's Note: Sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to let this fic lag behind. Oooh, have I kept you in suspense? '_

"Well what happened? How did they get in?" Ana ordered, looking around at the group incredulously. She was out of breath and out of patience, and damn near close to out of her mind as well.

They all sat or lay in the sand, trying to catch their breath after the attack. Tensions were high, they were all angry. At the situation and themselves.

"The door wasn't-" Terry panted. "Th-they…broke through the uh…" after that, he couldn't seem to find the right way to relay what exactly had happened. The gist of it was caught, however. Their petty barricade had been a hopeless effort.

Ana was frozen for a moment, shaking her head in disbelief. "Shit." She sat on the ground in frustration, muscles burning from the acid coursing through her veins as she tried to think through the numbness of her brain. She didn't want to act out on her fury, but God, was she ever angry. Look at what had happened. Look at what had happened because they had done exactly what she told them was a bad idea. They'd lost Tyler because of it. They'd _lost Tyler_, Christ…she thought back to the argument they'd had prior to leaving, about how Tyler was sick and they couldn't just take him on some ignorant little expedition. Had they listened? They hadn't. They hadn't, and Tyler had paid the price for it.

She looked her companions over, all of them in a miserable silence that was only accompanied by a few gasps and pants. They were lucky they made it out if there with as many people—uninjured—as they had. Lucky that they all weren't just torn apart in their sleep. But she had to shake her head at what was left. Now, in addition to being one man down, they had nearly no supplies, no weapons, nothing at all. Just the clothes on their backs and the memory of a damn stupid mistake. Another one. _Fuck!_ Ana thought as she kicked the sand with her shoe. _How many God damn stupid mistakes are we gonna make? We leave the mall—which we were lucky to have—for this shit island, and then, when we're lucky enough to have an uninfested area where they haven't found us, and we blow it all by chancing our lives on some fucking adventure. Perfect._ She snorted and rested her head down in her arms.

"Chips." Nicole sighed as the dog came bounding up to her. She sighed and hugged him, putting her face into his fur.

"What do we do now?" Terry lifted his head, eyes in the direction of their original camp, which was only a few feet away.

No one responded. It was obvious what they would do now. The same thing that they had done every time something like this went down: pretend that nothing happened and go on. They were all just sick of doing it. They all sat in silence for a few moments longer before Kenneth became the initiator of said reaction, standing to his feet and brushing the sand off his clothes. "Let's build up a fire." He muttered. Ana wanted to berate him for his damn 'visage of apathy' persona, but she looked at him and could see the build-up of strain on him. He may have hid his stress well, but he'd been doing it for much too long.

Ana just turned her head away, unable to take this awful mood once again. The same thing after they'd lost Michael, after they'd landed on the island, and now this. In the end, though, what else would they do? She just supposed they didn't have the luxury of giving up.

Kenneth stopped short of himself in an instant as he stood, eyebrows high as he gawked towards the direction from which they had come. Fearing the worst at his unexplained stillness, they all turned to follow his gaze. There really wasn't anywhere to run now, nowhere to go if they'd been followed.

Tyler was coming towards them from the distance, looking behind him as his feet made a slow stumble for them, one arm clutched the other in a nervous jitter.

"Tyler?" Ana sprang to her feet, feeling as though an anchor was lifted off of her shoulders. He was _alive_? More or less, anyway.

"Holy shit…" Kenneth muttered. The others were rising as well, surprise clearly written in their faces along with a great deal of apprehension. Ana came to a halt within roughly five feet of him, watching as he stopped and stared, almost seeming to look right past her. He was shaking.

"What happened…?" she almost reached out to him, but quickly thought better of it. _Please say something…_

Tyler let out a shuddering sigh and swallowed, shaking his head as though he'd seen something simply too terrible to tell. "They…" he croaked, voice a whisper. He suddenly couldn't quite support himself as he stepped a foot out to the side and his legs buckled underneath him, bringing him to his knees.

Ana was down in front of him, hands on his shoulders as she tried to snap him out of his trance. "Tell me what happened. What did they do to you?"

This elicited some form of grumble as he put a hand to his head. "They didn't…they just…It was like they didn't even know I was _there_. I just expected them to be…to be on me."

"…" Ana's eyes went wide and she looked back at the others.

"I thought I'd had it for sure." He blinked a few times. "But they…didn't even touch me…"


	16. A Little Left of Nothing

****

**Talker** – Chapter Sixteen: A Little Left of Nothing

_Author's Note_:_ You reviews are all very appriciated. And Psilontech, you did indeed call it. Curse you, you have earned a Jolly Rancher. Shakes fist dramatically_

"He's sleeping." Ana answered, knowing the question even before anyone dared to ask it as she re-entered the group. Sitting near the fire, she put a hand to her head. "He's sort of out of it right now."

"I'll say." Kenneth shook his head and prodded the fire with a stick, causing it to spit up a mouthful of embers up into the sky. "Damn glad the guy made it back."

"He's lucky." Terry agreed.

"He's more than that." Ana countered, before then adding quietly, "But I'm sure he doesn't feel that way."

"It's fucking unbelievable." Terry rubbed a hand over his hair roughly, processing the turn of events as best he could. "I mean, you're right; lucky doesn't even begin to describe it. What did he _do_? Why the hell didn't they kill him?"

"The same reason _we _didn't." Ana said darkly. The group was visibly mortified at that. So both sides, infected and living, saw Tyler as one of them. The idea had stunned them into silence for a few moments.

"Is he gonna be alright?" Kenneth questioned, a little softer.

Ana threw out one hand. "I don't know. I guess. He's scratched up, nothing major that I can tell."

Terry waited a long while with a certain thought in his head, glancing off to the side. About twenty feet away from them, Tyler lay in the sand, out cold. He wasn't sure if it was the right time to be bringing it up, but at least it would prevent another silence from coming on. "It was stupid." He stated sternly.

At this, a tense air lifted from the group, each looking to him inquisitively. They all knew what he was talking about, but a mixed kind of emotion came off of that. "You're right." Ana agreed with a rather unhappy laugh.

"We shouldn't've taken the risk." He continued as he picked up a stick and aimlessly began to trace patterns with it in the sand.

"I don't know about that." Kenneth took a long look at the group gathered around him. "If they hadn't attacked the resort, we'd still've been better off. And we were, until things went bad."

"Yeah well that's the point, isn't it Ken?" Ana's voice was unsually cold. "It _did _happen. It _did_ go bad. It's just like I said—now we're even worse off than we were before. You still think we should've done it? Why don't you tell that to Tyler?"

He paused, not sure how to approach her accusation of ignorance. "Look, you're takin' it wrong, okay? I was just sayin' that a risk is worth taking. I'm sorry it went wrong, I'm not sorry we did it. There was no way we could've known they would attack there just like there was no way we coulda known they were on this island in the first place."

"We _should've_ known _both_." Ana disagreed. "_Look_ at the shit that's happened to us every time we take a 'risk'."

It was not the first time Ana and Kenneth did not see eye-to-eye, but Terry changed the direction of the conversation all the same with his next quandry. "So do you think they could follow us back here?"

None of them wanted to think about that. "They could follow us anywhere." Kenneth leveled. "It's their island, after all."

"They didn't find us before." Ana sighed. "I guess the only thing we can do is hope that they don't find us again."

"But where does that leave us?" Nicole asked as she looked up. "Are we gonna spend the rest of our lives here?"

"We've gotta spend it somewhere." Kenneth jabbed dryly.

"I'm serious." Nicole had a sort of scowling pout.

"Well we didn't wanna spend it at Crossroads and we don't wanna spend it here…we're gonna have to look at the fact that right now, nowhere's that safe. Nowhere's that free." He rephrased himself.

"Amen to that…" Ana mumbled, resting her chin on a palm.

"I don't want to die like some caged animal." Nicole fought back. "I don't want to give up."

"No one's giving up, Nicole." Terry said quietly, putting a hand on her leg. "We're surviving. We're gonna keep on surviving."

"Sure. Surviving." She put her hand on his and looked away. "Well that's fine. We're surviving. What about _living_, Terry?"

He opened his mouth as if to say something, but in the end settled for just gripping her hand.

"It would be a miracle if they all just…starved to death." Ana said in a moment of spoken thought.

Kenneth nodded, sharing her hopes. "Sure hope they can. Their food's runnin' out a hell of a lot faster than ours."

"I wouldn't pretend it's the smartest thing to hope for. Those things sat outside the mall for weeks with nothing to eat. Without even weakening." Ana said, cutting off her previous mention.

"Well they can't live forever. They aren't even living now. They'll just rot to pieces eventually, won't they?" Terry seemed to direct this question at Ana, who, obviously, had the most knowledge with the human body.

"One would assume." She shrugged. "It would be impossible for them to just…exist…forever."

"Sure as hell hope not." Kenneth said, rubbing his knuckles against his knee.

"But this infection…" she took in a breath. "Well I don't know _what_ the hell it is. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. It makes the plague look like a flu outbreak—the common cold. I have no idea what it does, or why it does it. I don't even care anymore."

"I guess it's not really-" Terry looked up suddenly, something catching his eye. "Ana," he gestured in concern over her shoulder.

She turned her head immediately to Tyler, reeling at what she saw. He was far from being as unconscious as he'd been left—jerking, making spasmatic motions like someone was shaking the life out of him as he lay there helpless. "Oh shit!" she growled, climbing hurriedly to her feet and rushing to him.

"Ana, don't!" Kenneth reached out for her, but she was already down at his side.

"_Fuck_, Kenneth, he's not _turning_!" she cried, tilting Tyler's head back and holding it in her lap. "He has untreated head trauma, he's having a _seizure_!" it was difficult to tend to him with his erratic tremors, but if nothing else was in their favor, Ana knew what she was doing. A wave of horrendious panic hit the others like a hurricane, the fear and assumption stuck in their heads that they were watching someone die before them yet again, and this time there was absolutely nothing to do but watch. There was nothing to defend him from, nothing to make it stop. Kenneth took to Tyler's side, making a move to push him down. "Don't!" Ana ordered. "Don't hold him back."

"Well what the hell are we supposed to-" he started, but she cut him off.

"Just leave him! Leave him…" she waited, suddenly aware that Tyler's muscles were calming and he was starting to gasp for breath. The spasms came to a jittering halt.

She shoved him over onto his side and he threw up, heaving a great deal of watery vomit out into the sand next to him before falling still, save for a kind of nervous shivering. Ana paused, making sure that he was indeed breathing before her tenseness faded.

"It's okay, it's okay…Relax, Tyler, you're okay now…" she said, stroking the side of his head gently. His breath was coming out in shallow sweeps, eyes glazed over and limbs limp against the ground. Dazed and pained from the acid churning in his chest, it seemed that even his small trembling was a great effort. "Could you get some water, Kenneth?" she said quietly, not looking at him.

"Yeah." He obeyed, beginning his search quickly eager to do anything that would help the situation.

There were a few moments of strained breathing before Tyler coughed once and sighed, planting his face into his palm and groaning. "Ana…?"

"It's alright. Don't talk. Just take it easy." She hushed him, feeling his forehead. Much to her relief, and surely furthermore to his, somewhere along the line his fever had dissapated.

He closed his eyes and started to shiver again, letting his hand fall back into the sand as though he were surrendering. Ana looked down upon him for a long while, touching the wound in his head lightly and wondering…in the back of her mind, just how many more of those shallow breaths he would take. She wouldn't be able to bear the sight of another death under her hands…


	17. Theories and Analyzations

**Talker** – Chapter Seventeen: Theories and Analyzations 

__

_Author's Note: Well I could have split it into two chapters, but then one would be pretty short and the other pretty long. So as it stands, it's one. And now it really is too long. Oh well. (I'm sorry about your hamster, Gray. Didn't mean to bring up bad memories! XO) Thanks to all for more than kind reviews._

"I never saw him fall. When did he hit his head?" Terry sat back down, eying the rather unattended fire in the growing daylight.

"I don't know, it must've been a while before we found him." Ana explained, arms crossed as she stared dejectedly into the sand. "I knew it was bad when I first took a look at him. God, I should've done something."

"What could you have done?" Kenneth said from behind.

"I don't know. Something." She was sure about that.

"It was just a seizure, it's not _that_ dangerous, is it?" Terry said, helping Nicole toss some sand onto the discarded fire.

"It could get worse." She rubbed her temples in frustration.

"Anything could get worse. How does it look _now_?" Kenneth forced a bottle of water into her hands.

She paused, pushing out a long breath. "Well he…he's not in a coma, that's always a good sign. But that with this seizure thing and the color blindness—He's been hurt pretty bad. And now he's got the stress, the added injury, and I don't know _what_ to do with him."

"Where is he now?" Terry looked around, but didn't see him.

"He slept a little bit. He's in and out." She said tiredly, sitting again and taking a drink of her water.

"Well he's made it through this much." Kenneth said surely, sensing the dismal mood amongst his group members. "If he can live through the infection, he can live through anything."

"I don't…" Ana stared. They all waited for her to continue, watching as she stared into the sand with her brow furrowed. She suddenly realized that they were all looking at her, and she straightened up with an uncomfortable mutter. "Well what I was going to say is…I was thinking about him just now. Before, I mean. When I was treating him. I was thinking about, you know…why he is the way he is."

This immediately drew their attention. They hadn't discussed the terms of Tyler's condition in great depth, being as they were so initially shocked about it. But when offered a possible reason, they were all interested. "What were you thinking?" Terry encouraged.

She bit her lip, wondering if her thoughts could come out less scattered than they were in her head. "I have this theory." She began, absently playing with the ends of her hair as she rubbed her sore shoulder. "I sort of thought at first that Tyler had some kind of immunity against it, or even a delayed reaction in his body. Naturally, I mean I'm assuming that's what we all thought. So I started thinking about why it would affect him lightly or what he had that others didn't and every damn paragraph to the last word and correct punctuation of every medical book I ever crammed into my head and came to the conclusion that it could be _anything_ without me knowing what causes the infection in the first place." She had to take a breath after that. "But…"

"But…?" Kenneth repeated, curious.

"I was just…thinking." She held out her hands in a gesture to aid her muddled explanation. "After someone has a seizure, they can stop breathing. Or drown in their own vomit. But…anyway, he wasn't breathing for a minute after he had his seizure, so I was thinking I might have to give him mouth to mouth. And then I just…" she made a frustrated grumble, rubbing her cheek. "I was thinking that he's had that head injury for a while now. Since before we found him. Definitely before he was bitten." She stopped, biting her lip.

"Well I'm not following." Terry said, a confused expression clear on his face.

"Okay, look at it this way," she started again with a new determination. "When you have to give someone CPR, it means they've stopped breathing. It means they're dead already. What if Tyler didn't die from being bitten?"

"If he didn't die from being bitten, he wouldn't've gotten back up again." Kenneth stated.

"What if Tyler had a seizure, and he stopped breathing? He would be dead." She repeated.

"…Yeah?" Kenneth felt she was close to making her point here.

"Okay—and it doesn't happen very often—but sometimes, just sometimes, someone can start breathing again without recessitation. All on their own." She swallowed.

"No, I think I see what you're saying." Terry said, eyebrows raising. "Yeah, you mean like he…well he started breathing again after he 'died'?"

She nodded. "I don't know what the hell this disease is, but it apparently plays by some ground rules. If Tyler stopped breathing, he was clinically dead, which means the disease had reign of his corpse. But if his body gets kicked into gear by…I don't know, maybe a rush of adreniline or something, it could bring him to life again. But he'd have already been dead so-"

"The disease already would've had time to become active." Kenneth finnished, considering it. "It's an interesting idea, I'll admit."

Ana seemed satisfied that her thoughts were clear, biting down on her thumbnail. "It's just a guess. It's plausible…barely. It's asking for a lot of specifics."

"It does make sense, though." Terry threw an agreeing nod at Kenneth.

"Well maybe our Tyler's not a miracle at all." Ana concluded. "Maybe… he's the biggest medical fluke in history."

Tyler let his eyes fall shut, breathing in the warming air to calm himself and still his strange quaking. By now he was wracked at every nerve and it had taken quite a bit of effort to get himself fully awake, but he felt better once he was sitting up. His stomach hurt in a different way now. Where once it was restless and uneasy, it was now hollow and strained like someone had punched him in the abdomen, a feeling he obviously didn't appriciate. There was also a very odd pain in his head just behind his eyes. Along with those internal problems, he suffered from a few scratches and some bite marks on his right arm that he had received in the struggle. The disturbing thing was that they hadn't done it on purpose. Not that it mattered, being bitten a second time. It was a small, if the only, advantage to already being infected.

He wasn't sure that he remembered the events of the last few hours correctly, as they seemed to be massively jumbled at first. He saw the faces of the undead in his mind, himself cowering, scrambling to get away, a pain in his side. Tripping, stumbling, sand in his shoes. The suspicious taste of vomit in his mouth and the feeling of someone holding onto him, a voice instructing him to drink something and lie down somewhere and…his head all seemed to be a blur.

He tried to focus on something to clear it, such as where the others were. He deduced that they left him alone to recover. In fact…In fact yes, he thought he remembered Ana telling him just that. Of course. One by one the events in his head started to place themselves in order, until at last he was up to date with his current life and rather dissapointed. Only moments ago, he had been in an entirely different place. As he lay, mind flitting through a series of sleep and dellirium, bits and pieces of his mind had become enveloped in a wayward dream. It was simple, nothing spectacular like dreams he'd been known to have before. Not like when he was the king of Spain waging a monumental war against the people of Atlantis. He was at home. And it had been that simple. Except for the fact that his dog had been there, and his dog had been dead from a long-shot case of rabies long before he moved into that apartment. Despite that he was alone, it was still a far cry better than this beach, and this feeling.

He didn't fully understand what had happened to him, but he knew it had put some stress on the others. A panic attack maybe? Whatever it was, he knew he wouldn't want to deal with himself had the situation been reversed. It seemed like he was only a further burden to them with each passing day, and that gave him a signifigant guilt factor to handle along with his illness. There was nothing he could do. He was pathetic, he couldn't care for himself when it was most important that he did, and he was beginning to wonder if his grant to live past being bitten was a curse rather than a miracle. He'd always been a nuisance, he knew that. The only child his parents could harldy afford, but loved and so were obligated to suffer for. The aspiring writer who had, ironically up until just recently before the outbreak when his career seemed to be taking off, been barely getting by with odd jobs. And now, the bumbling half-infected creature whose only purpose now seemed to be to be a bother on everyone else's mind.

Well he'd just have to make due, he decided. He had before. Throughout his life, his efforts had been a subconscious struggle to prove that he was worth his parents' sacrifices for him, to become a successful writer and see that he had known what he was doing all along. He had to prove to himself that he wasn't a failiure, constantly hunting for publishers, picking up leads, and chasing his muse. He'd gotten lucky quite a few times. And now, he would get past this sickness and become a working member of the group. His goals in life had changed, and become much more dire and immediate. But he wouldn't let them down, because he'd made damn sure in life that he never let anyone down. Good old dependable Ty, who bails his friend out of jail at three in the morning when he needed to get home, who looks after his cousin's cat for a week when she was out of town and actually keeps it alive, who pretends once to be gay just so that his panicky friend Mick can have a double date with some clubhopping biker and his brother.

He almost laughed at the memory, but laughing now was just too much effort. Besides, that memory was long behind him, part of a life he could no longer claim. All the same, he couldn't help but remember them. It almost seemed like they had a life of their own, and their purpose was to haunt him. He just couldn't get his mind off of those things. A very breif job during college when he had worked at a new age book store. The first time he'd moved out to this place and met Cody. They seemed to him like events he'd read out of a story somewhere or seen out of a movie, not real people and real things that had happened to him. But he didn't want to think about them. They no longer existed. His friends were dead. His parents were dead. There would never be another reunion with either. Ah, this damn pain in his head…

He looked down at his gnarled arm in frustration before letting a troubled sigh fall from his chest. No friends or loved ones to rely on. Maybe he really had been relying on other people his entire life, emotionally anyway. Though through most of his life he had kept to himself and been on his own, he had never once thought that those people would be gone completely. Now they were. And he began to think that maybe he had needed them without realizing it. But he himself? …Well he had never been needed. No one had ever needed to be near him or needed to stay with him or talk with him. Not his parents, not his friends, not his occasional lovers. Certainly Ana and the others didn't need him, he was a pest at most. He was truly unneeded, the world could take him and leave him, but somehow, accidentally, it had left him breathing.

He didn't want to be here. But in reality, he didn't want his old life either. Not if he had truly been useless that entire time. For twenty-four years. He'd never once thought of himself that way, and now he saw how arrogant that was. Nothing of him was needed, by anyone he knew. What had he been thinking?

He let his head fall into his hands, remembering breifly his mother's laugh and the way the streets of Salem looked on a winter morning. The car his parents gave him on his seventeenth birthday and the way Cody managed to spill something on himself every time he ate. The taste of strawberry margarita and tequila shots and how much asprin it took to kill a hangover versus how much it took to kill you if you weren't careful. It didn't matter that it was gone because none of it had ever mattered in the first place. And for the first time, in such a long time, since long before the disaster had even started, Tyler began to cry. His long-endured wall of numbness and shock from his surroundings fell away as he buried his face into his hands and sank into a series of muted sobs. He felt like such an idiot.

He heard someone approach, but he didn't think much of it. Not until he realized that Ana was right beside him. "Tyler…" she said sympathetically, obviously confused.

He looked up instantly, tears spilling down his face in shock. "Ana, I uh-." He gruffly wiped away his tears and stuttered. "I'm sorry, I didn't see…"

"It's alright." She said in a hushed tone, nervous about the state he was in. He knew she must've thought he was cracking.

He desperately tried to get rid of his tears, but they were more persistant than he was. He hated looking like a pitiful sap who couldn't take the pressure. He could take it fine, the emotion just…caught him off guard, that was all.

"…We've all cried, Tyler…" she tried to assure him as she sat down. "I understand."

He looked away angrily, still wiping his eyes. "I…"

"Just don't worry about it…" she tenatively put a hand on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry…" he repeated, not turning to face her.

"Tyler-"

"I know you don't like me to apologize, Ana…" his tone was stern as he cut her off. "But I'm sorry. I _am_."

Ana cringed and bit her lip, kneading her hand gently into his shoulder. "You shouldn't be. None of this is your fault."

He didn't say anything for a while, at least not until he was sure that he'd stopped crying. "…I was just thinking about…things I should've forgotten. I'll be fine here, and it's late, you should go back to camp."

"I'll stay here, if it's all the same to you…" she said quietly, letting both hands drop into her lap. "I don't want to leave you out here alone."

"I'll be fine." He said again.

"I won't." she countered boldly.

He blinked a few times, taking a glance over at her and drawing his gaze back to the sand as a sudden sharp pain stuck him in the head again. "If you're sure." He muttered over it, putting his head back down in his hand. All of his emotional pain was suddenly replaced in entirity by a physical one. It buzzed in his brain and numbed down to his jaw, making him grunt and clench his eyes shut.

"Are you alright?" Ana's voice broke through his haze and he slowly opened his eyes.

"Just a sort of…" he stopped, his vision was spiraling madly. He couldn't make out the images. Everything blurred and he rubbed his eyes harshly. There was something wrong with his vision, he was sure. There was something different, something…something…he looked down at his hands and stared in amazement, stone still.

"Tyler? Tyler, look at me, what's going on?" he snapped to attention at Ana's voice, eyes wide and focused on her as he tried to process his shock. She nearly jumped when he smiled, almost as though he was seeing something surprisingly familiar. "What the hell is wrong?" she asked, in the dark about his strange behavior.

Something was definitely different about his vision. "You know something…" he began, still smiling lightly. "Your hair really is a pretty shade of blond."


	18. Man to Man

**Talker** – Chapter Eighteen: Man to Man 

_Author's Note: I'm not dead yet—I've just suffered a severe case of writer's block. But after extensive surgery, the problem seems to have improved, and thus I continue to chapter eighteen…_

It was night by the time the group had settled a little. The anger and the fevered stress had died down and they all began to function well with each other again. Though the incident at the resort was not forgotten, not by far, it was at least forced to the back of their minds where it needn't be touched for the time being. Each knew, however, that it would have to be dealt with sooner or later with the situation being as it was.

Tyler came back to the camp gradually, not quite desiring to speak with the others in the uncertainty of how they felt. As of now, he didn't know where most of them were anyway. He thought he saw Ana and Nicole together a ways off, and so he assumed that Kenneth and Terry must have been somewhere close by. He looked around for them, but didn't find anyone, so he went back to the center of the camp. As he stood next to the fire, he looked somewhat lost or out of place—precisely how he felt. It was strange to be here without the rest of the group, like he had just assumed they would always be there. He almost worried, in fact, about where they all were, but he decided that it was better for him to be alone right now all the same.

He slowly pulled off his shirt and tossed it down, using the light of the fire to examine the painful cuts and bruises on his body, and a particular area where the discomfort seemed to be coming from. He made his discovery rather immediately. Jammed into his skin, just below one of his ribs (a very obvious place considering that he could count them), was a long sliver of wood that had gotten lodged in him when he was pushed to the floor. He'd noticed it then, but had forgotten about it in his dumbstruck horror. The horror of looking up at those hideous faces and scrambling away into a corner like a frightened dog. They didn't look back at him, though, no matter how long he waited for them to. He just didn't have time to worry about the miniature stake in his rib cage. Now that he thought about it, however—damn. It hurt like hell. He clenched his teeth and drew it out, stopping the flow of blood with his other hand and sighing in relief as he threw it into the sand. He hoped it wouldn't get infected…He smirked at that.

Footsteps were approaching him, hearing the displacement in the sand slow in pace as the person came closer. He recognized the figure as Terry, who was looking at him curiously in the reddish glow of the fire. Tyler merely gaped for a few moments, studying him for the first time in color and making a few pointless mental notes about it. "Hi…" he muttered weakly.

Terry cleared his throat, scratching a shoulder as he nodded. "Hey man."

Tyler reached down and found his shirt, starting to put it back on, unwilling to expose his injury. No sense in making a fuss.

"So uh, how do you feel?" Terry was making a good attempt at polite conversation. It was a nice effort, if only a little awkward.

He shifted his shirt back on and shrugged lightly, eyes flickering up to his face every so often. "Little better, actually."

Terry nodded and swallowed, looking down and seeming as though he was trying to think of something to say. It was easy to understand how he felt, the two hadn't so much as properly introduced themselves since he arrived. "Well Ana and Nicole are down by the beach, and I think Kenneth's out there with them. At least I hope so. I hate it when he goes wandering off."

Tyler thought back to when Kenneth had carelessly shoved him from harm without regard to self-interest back at the resort. "Guess he just thinks he can take care of himself." he suggested.

Terry gave a forced smile and looked around, sitting down next to the fire after a moment of deliberation. "I think he thinks he can take care of all of us. Well honestly…I guess he's done a pretty damn good job of it so far."

"Hm." He rubbed his cheek with a shaking hand and glanced over at Terry, who was making it an obvious point to be casual. There was an extended period of silence, only broken by the occasional crackle of burning wood and the off-key chirp of croaking crickets. "…Can I ask you something Terry?"

He straightened up, a serious expression on his face. "…Yeah. Sure."

Tyler thought for a moment, daring to look right at him with undead eyes. "…Are you afraid of me?"

Terry looked up instantly, shock clearly in him from that question. "No, I-." His cheeks burned slightly as he stuttered, feeling foolish. "I mean no…of course not… Should I be?" that last part had meant to be a joke…why didn't it sound that way in his ears?

Tyler released a husky breath and he returned his gaze to the sand, not meaning to intimidate him. "I was just thinking…maybe…you know, maybe I would be afraid of me, too."

"I'm not afraid of you." Terry decided definitely. "It's just the sickness…It's made us all paranoid, really."

"But I have the sickness." Tyler pointed darkly to his chest, lowering his head and touching the cut on his chin. "That doesn't scare you?"

Terry waited to find his answer, eyes studying the spirling fire as he shook his head. "I would be scared if I was you…I'll admit that."

"Man, I just don't know…" Tyler let his eyes blur to focus on the few awful visions that spun through his mind. "_They_ seem to think I'm one of them." That came out almost as a whisper as breathless as it was, fingers touching the gored teeth marks in his forearm.

Terry couldn't help but feel an uncomfortable chill at those words, whether or not he protested to the fact. How would he feel if it were him? What would he be doing? Would he take it the same way Tyler was? "Yeah well…" he started. "They _don't_ think. And…I know the guy that pulled one of those bastards off me back there sure wasn't one of _them_." He looked up, cautiously watching his companion for a moment. "I owe you one."

Tyler smiled faintly, but he didn't seemed too moved by the sentiment. "Don't feel like you owe me anything. I…it was really a spur of the moment reaction, I don't want you to think I'm a hero. Trust me, I uh…Huh, I'm not that brave. I didn't even really realize what I was doing."

"You still did it." Terry cut in. "And if you hadn't, I don't know where I'd be. So don't be so modest, okay?" he gave a slight grin.

He thought about it for a little while before he shrugged. "Hey…don't mention it."

Terry felt a bit more satisfied, offering a silent sigh and resting his elbows out on his knees. "So Ana…told us you took a hit to the head."

"Uh, yeah. I guess so." Tyler agreed. "But I don't remember how, if you were gonna ask. I don't really…remember much at all before this whole thing started happening. It's all kind of…distant…if you know what I mean."

Terry nodded grimly and kept his eyes on the fire, allowing the image to sear into his mind to replace ones previously burned there. "Yeah. I know exactly what you mean."

Tyler paused, then rubbed the back of his head. "It's probably not that bad." He reasoned. "I think Ana's just concerned because she fixed people up for a living, and now she can't. I guess that just gets under her skin."

"It's more than that. She's worried. I don't know, Ty…you didn't look so good last time we saw you."

Tyler considered his statement bitterly before letting the memory of last night bother him, tossing it aside. "Sometimes I wonder if I should worry about _her_." He straightened up almost like that thought surprised even himself.

"Really?" Terry's brow dropped in mild confusion. "…About Ana?"

"It's that she worries so much. About the rest of us. It's almost like she feels that we're all her responsibility." He explained.

Terry took and aimless glance back at the direction where Ana had gone. "That's Ana for you…she's tough."

"But what happens to her when she can't do it anymore…" Tyler took a minute to think about that. When had he started spending so much time analyzing her? "Why is she like that…?" he asked. "You know, why does she feel like it's all on her shoulders? Like she feels guilty or soemthing… Did something happen?"

Terry swallowed and didn't take his eyes off the fire, lost in thought. He eventually had to look away when the smoke threatened to draw tears from his eyes. "A lot of things happened. Maybe you would just have to know her. She's always been like that. Part of it's probably because she's a doctor, and she still feels like that's her job. And since we got to this island…it's just gotten worse. She's like Kenneth, in a way. She thinks that as long as we're okay, she's doing her job. She can feel important. Something like that."

"I guess I can see that." Tyler said. But in the back of his mind, there was really only one question he truly wanted to ask. "…Can I ask you what happened to you guys? Where you came from?" he seemed unsure if he really wanted to know. It was undoubtedly not a happy story.

"…It's only fair…I mean, you received a pretty harsh interrogation yourself, so…" He looked up at Tyler with a strange expression, one that looked as though it was to warn him, but at the same time, appealing to his humanity in a sense of trust. "I'll start from the beginning…"

There was a good deal of sorrow just in that tone, and Tyler began to wonder just what kind of story Terry was about to tell him…

"I was a security guard at the Crossroads Mall…"


	19. Blue Skies

**Talker** – Chapter Nineteen: Blue Skies

_Author's Note: Well I was going to put this up yesterday, but surprise! FF.net was down. Do'h! So here it is. And on another note, while suggestions are appriciated, this story is already pretty much planned out, plot-wise. In fact, most of this story is done, but many finished chapters have yet to be posted in light of editing purposes. I have little written summaries of each unwritten chapter pre-scratched out, so the plot is going to pretty much be that way. Thank you, though! Reviews are sincerely appriciated, as afore mentioned. You all rawk to pieces _

"I've looked everywhere. He just wandered off." Nicole flopped onto the ground next to Terry miserably, head in her hands.

"He does that all the time, Nicole, that doesn't mean he won't be back." Terry assured as he placed a languid arm around her. "It's not like he's in any danger. Those things don't even notice dogs."

"I just wish I knew where he was. That's all." She explained, looking up briefly. "I don't want to be seperated…I don't want any of us to be seperated."

"I know."

"Last I saw him," Kenneth said as he came into the group, apparently trying to ease their concerns. "he was chasing after one of those damn weasel things. Came zipping right past me. To tell you the truth, I'm glad he feels the same way I do; those little fuckers are mean as hell."

"There, you see?" Terry looked back to Nicole. "He'll be back once he catches a few."

"You're right, I know, I'm just…"

"Worried, I know." Terry grinned slightly and pulled her into him.

"Where did Tyler disappear to?" Ana cut in, looking to the dying fire. There was now daylight, but none of them had slept.

"He went out to look for Chips." Terry said, pausing slightly.

"He's just out there…?" Ana's expression was discontented.

"Well he said he wouldn't go passed the beach. I think maybe he wanted to be alone." Terry replied. Despite his efforts to prevent it, he yawned, exposing a tiredness they were all surely feeling by now.

"We're runnin' low." Kenneth said from a few steps off, aimlessly prodding around at their rather exiguous supplies.

"Thanks for the update." Ana eyed him as he handed her a granola bar. She tried to keep the mood light, but all things considered, she knew that this was the worst of the group had ever been. The lowest in supplies, in the most desserted place, in bad health and high stress with no real promise and no definate hope that things would get better. They hadn't spoken in any kind of depth or reminisence about the events surrounding the Crossroads Mall (with the currently unknown exception of Terry), and Ana found herself straining just to remember what had happened. Not that she wanted to remember, but she wasn't willing to give up any part of her mind. She may have nothing else in the world, but if she lost that, she was no one. She may as well be one of them.

"Well I need to find him." Ana said, standing up.

"Chips?" Terry looked up.

Ana narrowed her eyes and snorted good-naturedly. "_Tyler_."

Terry chuckled nervously and scratched his head. "Yeah. Duh. Sorry."

She stopped for a moment, almost seeming to need to justify it to herself. "…Even if he wants to be alone, we can't leave him out there. Something could happen to him, he…he could lapse into another seizure."

The others looked up at her from where they sat, observing her jittery impatience that she had been pressing on as of late. Not that she could be blamed, however unlike her it was. "Okay, Ana." Kenneth shrugged.

She nodded, but hesistated before she turned away. They had looked at her so strangely…was it possible that she hadn't hid her feelings as well as she suspected? Perhaps they really could sense that she was breaking down, little by little. That between failing health and fading luck she was starting to allow herself despair, a prized enemy she had always managed to fight off before. How ironic that she was most nervous when they were most calm. She had seen truly the most atrocious and grotesque parts of humanity and the diseases that come with it. She'd seen the inside of a human being in more ways than she had ever thought possible, and watched them turn inside out while alive and screaming. But it was now that she was coming apart. When in a disaster, she didn't have to think, she need only act, but when there was nothing upon which to act…well, she was forced to think.

She didn't like this part of her. The part that was afraid of things, the part that felt like it couldn't handle them. It had been fine, up until now, to conceal that part and pretend it was not there, and if it was, that it had no control of her nor impact on her judgement. But the idea that the others could see it made her feel weak, like a crazy fool who was losing her credibility fast. She suddenly found herself standing on the beach, whereupon she began her journey to find Tyler.

What would they think of her now? Damnit, they used to rely on her, she used to be needed. She was a strong point in the group who held them fast together. And now she was falling away from them. How and when did that happen? Since Tyler arrived? Since they landed on the island? Since they had escaped from the mall? Or since Michael died…? All those long nights working in that hospital, getting to know patients, laugh and joke with them, watching them die the very next day. It was so much like life now; they were fine one moment and dead the next. But it was different. It was different in so many ways. As a doctor, those things didn't effect you, you got over them quickly and moved on. As a person, however, you never did.

She found Tyler sprawled out in the sand on his back near the edge of the trees, arms behind his head as he lazily gazed up at the clouded sky as though it were any average day. He looked peaceful, and it made her smile just slightly. For some reason, she had just expected him to look like a nervous wreck. Perhaps that was just because she herself felt that way… "Hey Ty." She greeted, looking down as he craned his head back to see her.

"What's up?" he asked, a curious kind of concern on his face. "You're not coming to give me bad news, are you?"

"No worse than usual." She said, folding her arms across her chest. "Just the obvious. Are you okay out here?"

"Hey, give me a surf board and this is paradise." He reasoned, looking down his body at an untied shoe.

Ana chuckled, glancing out at the water with the memory of crowded beaches. Full of couples, teenagers, excited kids, Luis and herself on a vacation once... "You surf?"

"No." Tyler waited for a moment, thinking to himself. "I always wanted to, actually. Just one of those things on the 'never to do list' we all keep. You know?"

She nodded. "I know. I had a couple…go sky diving, base jumping, all things I never seemed to 'find the time for'." Another odd hesitation. "…I'm not bothering you, am I?"

"No," he pushed himself up to a sitting position, staring up at her sincerely. "Of course not…You can, if you want to, though." He smirked.

Ana took his offer and sat down near him, lounging in a disordely fashion and no longer bothering to conceal her tiredness. Tyler, she had found, was a bit of an opptimist, and she needed the relief from the depression of reality. "How are you feeling? Your head bothering you?"

"I get headaches every now and then. I'm okay." He assured, brushing the sand out of his hair. "It just seems kind of funny after all this time…well even though it's really only been about a week…to have my color back."

"I guess it would be." She agreed, following his gaze to the swirling blue-gray tides, imagining what the world would be like all in monotone. Like perpetual Winter. She never did care much for Winter, the bleakness of it all. "I think I'd miss green the most. I don't know why. The lushness…the nature, I guess."

"Well I missed blue." He admitted, resting back on his hands. "The ocean…the sky. Those flowers down there that I never noticed before." He flipped a gesture in said direction.

Ana took a long glance at those flowers, realizing that they had also gone previously unnoticed to her. She used to love flowers; now they seemed to have so little importance. "You know what color I would miss the least?"

He smiled bitterly and looked back at her, echoing her own thoughts. "Red."

She turned her head slowly back towards the sea with a distant mourning as a million associations with the vile sheen of crimson crossed through her mind in macabre dance of memories. "Red."


	20. Just an Innocent Chat

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty: Just an Innocent Chat

_Author's note: Uh oh, did I scare off my readers? Eek! Anywhosit, things are starting to…uh…happen? This story is well on its way. Offline, it's almost finished. Enjoy._

"Well you can imagine, I was pretty pissed. Probably more pissed than I'd ever been at anyone." Tyler relayed, throwing out his hands as though to convey his mentioned rage through them. "I felt like I'd spent the night in a cement mixer, and I guess I looked about as good. So by the time I got to his door, I was _livid_. I mean seething like a rodeo bull. I pounded on his door," he cleared his throat, surpressing a chuckle. "and I just punched him in the mouth, soon as he opened it."

"You _hit_ him?" Ana laughed, by this point very into his tale. He nodded fervorantly.

"After that, I let him have it. I just lay into the guy. I was screaming so loud that I ran myself hoarse, and man, he was just _laughing_ his head off the whole damn time. I thought I was gonna reach out and strangle him right there."

"Well what did you end up _doing_?" she asked jovially.

Tyler was laughing himself at the memory, a hand on his head. "Cody, that bastard. He just laughs until tears are soaking his shirt and asks—yeah, he has the nerve to ask 'What the hell are you so angry for?'. And I said, 'What the hell am I angry for? You wanna know _what_ the _hell_ I'm _angry _for? I'm _angry_ because there's a _fucking tattoo_ of a _butterfly_ on my _ass_, dipshit!'!"

Ana put a hand over her mouth in an attempt to stifle a wild fit of laughter that hit her as her eyes widened in shock, doubling over where she sat slightly and shaking her head. "Oh…my…God…you have…? You mean…?"

"Yeah, laugh it up." Tyler said in mock-annoyance. "That's right. I do."

"Oh God, that's…_awful_!" she continued to erupt into snickers at his expense.

"Hey hey hey, come on! It's black, it's a-a manly butterfly!" he grinned and slapped a hand over his face.

"I-I'm sure it is, it-" she tried, choking on her own laughter.

"Like you've never been plastered enough..." He shook his head, still laughing.

"I guess there was one night," she tried to compose hereself. "I went out for a few drinks with some co-workers. Only it wasn't really a few. And it wasn't really night by the time we were done. I must've tried my key in every single car in that parking lot before I realized that I was parked across the street…but at least I don't have a personal everyday reminder on my-"

"Okay, okay." He buried his head in his hands. "Why do I tell people that story, God, it's so embarassing." 

"I don't know, but I'm glad you did. Jeez, do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for something to make fun of you for?" Ana prodded, lightly punching his shoulder.

"Great. Now I'm gonna have to find something on you…" he said deviously as he watched a scattered collection of sand crabs that had edged gradually towards them. They were making their way to the shore, wherein they would submerge themselves beneath the sand under the rolling tide.

"I've done plenty of stupid things." She replied, not meaning to sound quite so suddenly serious about that.

"Well I doubt that." He took a side glance at her. "You've about got the most level head of anyone I've ever met."

She rolled her eyes and smiled. "Thanks, but I don't know how much it's helped."

"It sure as hell's helped me." He looked down. "Otherwise I'd've either bled to death or gotten my head blown off from the start."

They could both feel the mood shift into darkness. How did it always seem to come to that?

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that…" Tyler said with a weak half-smile. "To uh…say it like that. Thanks, was all I meant. For what you've done for me."

She felt a definate pang of guilt at that. She just couldn't help it. They hadn't exactly treated him well in her opinion, brushing him off, watching him from a distance, leading him into a zombie infested area while he was sick and injured. They hadn't really treated him like he was…one of them. And suddenly she felt horrible, compelled to try and apologize, but knowing it would be in vain. Here he sat thanking her. "It's okay." She shrugged.

They sat silently for a long while after that, gazing alternately to the darkened sky and the ocean in a sort of calm that had come upon them secretively. The silence was ironically a nerve-wracking tranquility to them.

"So I guess this island is ours now." Ana said, that thought making her feel funny. Well technically it was theirs now, wasn't it? Who else was left to own it besides the dead?

"I guess so…" Tyler agreed after a moment of consideration.

She laughed silently and closed her eyes briefly before opening them again. "So what would you call this island? I mean it's ours. We can name it."

"And I get naming rights?" he cocked his head to a side.

"Why not?"

"Hm…" he looked out at the ocean again and narrowed his eyes, letting his vision fall unfocused with the thought of this opportunity. "Then I shall call the island 'Tyler'."

A rough snort was all that came from Ana, a mirthful semi-chortle that marked her surprise. "Gee, I thought you'd be a bit more creative."

"No, it's a good name for an island. And I'll be the ruler of Tyler." He nodded.

"Oh really? And what am I?" she absently picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through her fingers. "Your servant?"

"Well you can co-rule Tyler." He decided. "I'd be a good ruler. Cultivate the land, create world peace, make tax cuts, you know."

"Co-ruler? And what exactly does that entitle me to?"

"You get to be the ruler when I'm indisposed or…have to use the bathroom or something." He explained.

"Oh yes, I can see that." She said jokingly, eying a crab that was making its merry way onto Tyler's shoe.

Tyler noticed it as well, leaning forward and picking it off to let the small creature rest amongst his fingers as he brought it up closer. "You, you shall spread the word of my takeover and-ow-" the crab responded by nipping his skin with a claw, upon which he furrowed his brow in disappointment. "Hey. How _dare_ you defy the king of this island."

Ana bit back another chuckle and lifted her head. "Oh so it's 'king' now?"

"Why not?" he set the crab back down and rubbed the nicked spot on his hand. "Didn't I tell you? That's what I wanted to be when I was five."

"A king?" she mocked.

"Yeah. Why? What did you want to be?"

She paused before letting a breath push the stray blonde hair from her face. "…a doctor."

They both looked at one another and laughed for a minute before Tyler muttered and shook his head. "You see? If you made it, why can't I?"

Ana smiled again and looked back to the easing tide pushing up against the shoreline. "Okay, Tyler. You can be the king of this island."

"I thought you'd see things my way." He proudly sat up straight and surveyed his new island. "The first thing I'm gonna do is put up an eviction notice."

"Good luck with that."

"Hey, you're gonna be helping me, right? I mean, you are sitting on Tyler after all."

She scoffed and shoved him slightly. "Oh really? Well maybe I'll just make some construction of my own on Tyler."

"Wha-? Hey!" he squawked as she dumped a handful of sand onto his head.

"I'm building you a castle, your highness." She quipped, reaching for another.

"Oh-ho, you'd better watch what you're doing, I know where you sleep." He shook his head roughly, letting he sand fall between his legs.

"I don't know, Ty, it looks to me like there's a revolt already." She pointed to the gathering of crabs that was sinking into the sand near the ocean tide. "They're abandoning you."

"Cowards!" he called out. He then turned to Ana with a small shrug. "They'll be back."

"Maybe." She said as she looked at him. "Then again, they're crabs, they might already have a king."

"Hm." He sighed.

"I don't know how much the others are gonna like the name of this island." She said, reaching up to ruffle the sand out of his hair.

"Yeah. They'll probably wanna name it something good. Damn them." He gave her a genuine smile as she looked back to him, her hand falling down onto his shoulder. "But…that's okay…" his smile faded.

"They'll just have to live with it as is, I guess." She paused. "One more thing to get used to."

"I don't know, I think they're still getting used to_ me_." He shifted.

Ana sombered, her expression softening. "…Tyler…" she tried to think of what she was supposed to say here. She couldn't apologize, he wouldn't understand. She couldn't tell him he was wrong, he wasn't. She knew the group didn't have any animousity towards him but…where had he ever had the opportunity to learn that?

"I-I didn't mean that like it sounded…what I mean is…I'm getting to know you guys. You accept me…even if I'm infected."

She grimaced, her fingers pressing into his shoulder. "Damn it, Tyler…you're a _man_, you still know that, don't you?"

"Yes…" he looked down for a while before returning to her. "…It's just that…I'm one of _them_, too. You know that."

"No you're not." She place her other hand on his wrist.

He forced his eyes to meet hers, eyes that he knew were not human. But she didn't falter as he may have expected. She only looked at him with that familiar mix of sorrow and sympathy and gently lifted a hand to touch the side of his face… He dipped down timidly and slowly, initiating a light kiss. Ana was frozen for a good long moment, shock tingling up her spine and inhibiting movement—until she was eventually acting without realizing it. Her hand released his arm in favor of his chest, lips parting just slightly to accept more of his contact while the other hand gripped his shoulder harder. He was offering a maddening kind of warmth that was unfamiliar from what she knew, not the lustful heat of passion or the raw friction of a human body. She wanted to embrace him, to kiss him deeper, but her panic was steadily kicking in instead. She quickly shoved away from him, panting lightly with a bewildered expression.

Tyler reeled, stumbling back from her. "Ana…Ana, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't've done that…" he desperately apologized.

She stood to her feet, a torrent of wild emotions stabbing her at all sides. "No…I…I have to go." She choked. Visions, memories, feelings, all rushing mercilessly up to meet her at once as she turned from him and quickly departed the scene.

"Ana-" Tyler called shakily. "God, I'm so sorry…" he wanted to go after her…to tell her he hadn't meant to. To apologize. But he'd already hurt her, he wouldn't be able to take it if he made things worse. "Such a fucking idiot!" he said to himself, pushing his head back down into his hands. _What the hell is wrong with you, Kawazumi? What the hell is wrong?…_

_Author's note: Damn. And it started out so happy, huh? Oh well. Will have more soon._


	21. Better Off Alone

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty-One: Better Off Alone

_Author's Note: Short chapter. But important._

He had almost fallen asleep, a few times. Mostly, however, his pressing anxieties had kept him mentally pacing for hours. He distantly felt as though he was completely alone now, which in literal terms he was, but somehow far more than he had ever felt before on this island. It was comparable only to the kind of desolate abandonment he felt when he had first awakened to the disaster back in the city. That sick horror in the pit of his stomach like a little lost child locked in a morgue. But this time it was his fault, a consequence of his own misconduct, and that changed things. But damn, how could he have been so stupid? He sure hadn't meant to do it, he didn't even register making the decision to do it, it had just happened. That was not the way he normally behaved…he rarely had been so bold as to make a move like that, the five or six girlfriends that he'd had had always been the first to kiss him. Hell, maybe that was why they'd left…

It seemed like out of all he had learned about Ana, he had simply ignored it. He vividly remembered Terry's tale of Ana and her first husband, and then, in another gruesome twist of fate, Ana and Michael. He remembered it so clearly because it was the very first time that he ever truly felt more fortunate for being alone when he awoke. It was no surprise; he lived alone. And though he didn't remember getting out of his building or where he had gone or what he had been thinking, he at least knew that he hadn't watched a loved one suffer brutally and then turn to attack him. He had seen Tom in his ghastly final moments, but he hadn't felt any connection for him. He didn't mourn for Tom anymore than a poor unlucky bastard—one who had infected him in the process anyway. Other than that, he hadn't seen any zombies holding the form of someone he recognized or loved.

Ana, on the other hand, had seen more than any human being had right to see. How unfair that seemed. At every turn she was broken down a little more, had to see one more person she'd grown attatched to killed before she could save them. That with the memories of two lovers slain in the midsts of this crisis, he would be surprised if she _hadn't_ run from him. This time he'd really made a mess of things. So what was he supposed to do now? He couldn't go back to them, not like that. _He_ hated himself, he couldn't imagine how_ they_ would feel.

He fell onto his back in exasperation, ignoring the throbbing in his injured arm. He was now wrestling with a sort of 'this is the rest of your life' sentiment, thinking about how he would grow old if given the unfortunate chance. Being old…what a curse that sounded like. He used to think about old age lightly, wondering how much he would look like his father and whether or not he'd be a successful writer like he promised. If he'd have any kids of his own. At twenty-four, he had started to think about these things…but as quickly as he had started, it ended. He'd die young if he was lucky…he didn't like sounding so utterly depressing, but he couldn't help it. It was the way things were, wasn't it?

He froze up again when he heard someone approaching, horrified but hopeful to think it could be Ana, or anyone else for that matter. He never cursed being alone so much. As he sat up, however, a weight toppled from his chest and a sigh crunched under his lungs. Chips. So the lost crusader was back from his quest… The dog was staring at him from a distance, nose low and pushed a ways towards the sand. "Hey boy." Tyler greeted. "Guess you found me out, huh?" he slowly drew up his knees with a pained sigh and shook his head, lifting his hand a little to beckon the island mutt.

Chips growled.

…

Growled?

Tyler lowered his hand and furrowed his brow. "You too, huh?" but the words died in his throat as he studied the animal before him. Something was wrong…Why did he stand with his tail between his legs? Why was he growling with his head held low…? And that chalky white build-up at the roots of his tongue and teeth…? Oh _shit_. Tyler knew. He knew because he'd seen it before, when his dog Jailburd died from the very same thing. _Rhabdovirus._ Rabies…

Shit. Shit. He wondered how for a minute before he realized the small bite marks along Chips's muzzle…those ferret creatures he'd been chasing. Those mean little bastards with needled teeth. How ironic that Chips could be immune to the worst plague unleashed upon mankind in history, but was taken over simply by such a common virus…With a chittering outtake of breath, he began to back away, careful to move slow and away from him so as not to rouse aggression. But it didn't help. Chips snarled and saliva flecked from his jaws, jolting his body into a ready-to-pounce state and stomach rumbling with a broken growl that made Tyler sweat.

"Easy…easy boy, come on…" he crooned, holding up his hands as he rose to his feet. What did he do now? He couldn't lead him to the others—he might attack, and rabies was fatal, even to a human being. It was almost as bad as the other…disease. In fact, briefly he wondered if the two were related. But he sure as hell didn't want to get bitten, either.

The dog kept on growling low, form shaky. It was clear by the progression of the disease that he would be dead in a matter of days, if not hours, and right now Tyler's biggest hope was that he would forget about him and wander off in his mentally deteriorating state. But that didn't happen. Every movement he made seemed to enrage the sick dog further, spurring him to make a threatening mock-lunge. He backed up just a little, about to call out to the dog again and get him to stay where he was when some wayward gesture seemed to set him off.

The dog leapt forward, teeth snapping out at the human in his path.


	22. Shit Out of Luck

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty-Two: Shit Out of Luck

_Author's Note: Okay, I know I've been slow on updating lately. Just haven't had much time to revise. Thank you for the reviews. _

"What was that?" Kenneth looked up and froze in mid-prod of the growing fire. Terry had previously been asleep near him until it was heard, his head jerking up and his eyes straining to a dizzy focus. Some form of yell. And…barking? They all went on immediate alert, Terry shaking the sleep quickly from his senses and Ana snapping out of her numb trance that she had mysteriously been in ever since she had come back. Kenneth threw the stick aside and jumped up, almost reaching for his gun out of mere instinct before remembering it was not there. Despite it, he made haste out of the camp towards the spot they had heard the disturbance, Terry in tow and Nicole and Ana fast on following.

"Chips?" Nicole called out, having initially heard the barking. "Chips, where are you?" she yelled.

"Tyler!" Kenneth look around, voice bellowing out over Nicole.

Ana was already moving forward, knowing where it was she had last seen Tyler. Kenneth and the others followed questioningly, but made no move to protest as they frantically listened for whatever it was that they heard. As they at last came upon the source after much furious searching, none of them were prepared for what it was they saw.

Tyler was on his knees, one hand to his stomach and the other to his head, both covered in blood. A few scant feet away, Chips lay, dead and bleeding profuse gushes into the now copper sand like he'd been hit by a truck. His jaw was broken open and his neck was resting in a very awkward position, throat must have being torn in the process of the bones breaking and thus producing such a large amount of blood.

"Holy shit…" was all Kenneth offered at the sight, taking a step back.

"_Chips_!" Nicole shrieked, moments after her shock dwindled. Terry snatched her back to stop her screaming fit, doing all but gagging her to stop her panic. Tyler was shaking his head, looking at the dead animal in horror and muttering things quickly under his breath.

"Oh God, oh God, I didn't mean to…" he pulled back a hand and stared at the red smear dripping through his fingers.

"Tyler…" Ana gaped in bafflement, unable to tear her eyes away from their poor slaughtered dog.

"Son of a bitch, what is _wrong_ with you!?" Kenneth sudddenly roared, and Tyler felt himself being hoisted to his feet by his shirt. He stared at Kenneth in a daze, gripping the hand that was holding him up with bloody palms.

"I-I didn't!" he cried out desperately as his daze fizzled out. "No, I didn't want to-"

"What the hell did you do it for?" Kenneth demanded.

"You _murdering bastard_!!" Nicole sobbed out, struggling wildly against Terry's grip.

"_No_, you don't _understand_!" Tyler yelled back, pulling slightly from Kenneth's hand but receiving no release from it. "He-he-"

"Yeah, it was a big fucking _accident_, well which one of _us_ is _next_?!" Nicole spat bitterly, Terry trying to quiet her.

"Nicole, stop!" Terry said harshly, gentle hands defying his tone as he embraced her tightly against him.

"It wasn't like that, _please_-" his eyes crossed Nicole with the deepest regret. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he-I-I didn't-"

"Tell us what happened." Kenneth ordered again with a little less venom, but his grip didn't relax.

Tyler fought his sudden dizziness and opened his mouth, pasuing for a moment. "He attacked me, I didn't have any other-"

"_Attacked_ you?!" Nicole broke in incredulously through her tears. "That's a _lie_! It's a lie, he _never_ attacked _anyone_!"

"But he was-" Tyler tried, but was cut off again.

"Unless he thought you were a threat! Which in that case I guess he would be right! And you _killed _him for it!" she continued, an unhealthy mix of rage and despair punctuating each word.

"You _don't understand_!" he repeated, his eyes suddenly catching a stupified Ana. His panicking struggle came to a steady halt, eyes filling with sorrow in place of fear and desparation. "Ana…please…you have to believe me…" he said quietly, seeming to forget about the others for the moment.

She stared at him in mild terror before her senses came back to her and she mentally kicked herself. "Kenneth, put him the _fuck_ down!" she snarled suddenly, turning to Kenneth. "This is _not_ a God damn _witch hunt_, he's not a _monster_! Don't be so gung-ho to crucify someone, damn it!"

Kenneth dropped Tyler in a bit of shock, both at Ana's outburst and the way things did indeed look. Tyler stumbled a little back from them, rubbing a hand through his hair in exasperation before realizing that he'd just streaked blood through it. "He was sick…that's the only reason he came at me…"

"Bullshit!" Nicole seethed. "He can't get the disease, those things wouldn't attack him!"

"They didn't have to." Came Terry's voice. They turned to see he had somehow slipped past them and was now crouching next to the corpse. He gently lifted the edge of the dog's jaw, exposing a dripping white gather that marked the clearest sign of his sickness. "Zombification doesn't make you foam at the mouth like this…"

They all stopped and fell silent for a moment, a wave of scattered confusion making them all stop and think. "Those things…those rodents that he was chasing." Ana said quietly, the conclusion that they were all eventually coming to. They all just stared blankly at the scene in disbelief, unwilling and unable to accpet another death. After a long while of silence, save for Nicole's unconscious sobbing, Kenneth shook his trance off and turned away, swallowing hard.

"Come on, let's…let's get out of here." he said dismally, waving a hand at the group. With a pained sigh, Terry stood and Ana followed, all making their way past Kenneth but Tyler, who stood still, staring down at his hands. He came to attention only when he realized that the others were gone accept for Kenneth, who was looking at him with an unreadable expression. "…You go on and clean up…then come back to camp." He ordered.

Tyler paused, offering a nervous nod of agreement as he looked back at the corpse. "…Yeah, I…"

Kenneth turned to follow the others, but stopped, a long sigh heaving in his chest. He tossed a glance back over his shoulder. "Did you have to kill him?"

Tyler blanched inwardly and dropped his hands to his sides, lowering his head. "He would've died anyway…"

"But did you have to _kill_ him first?" he repeated, more accusation this time.

"He…would've killed me." Tyler shook his head, looking back up at Kenneth with confusion and mild hurt.

"You don't know that…same as _we_ didn't." he threw a wayward gesture at Tyler's bitten arm.

He mentally fell back a step, hand self-consciously covering the wound and biting his lip. Aha. Now he understood…"…I'm sorry…" he murmured unhappily. There was nothing else to say…What could he have done…?

"Come on." Kenneth looked away, feeling a little uneasy about what he had just said. One of those things that just kind of came out without censorship. "We all gotta figure out what the hell we're gonna do about our supplies."

_Author's Note: Ahh! I know, I know, I killed him, I'm sorry. Before you grab your torches an pitchforks, remember that I didn't REALLY kill him. In the fanverse he's still livin' it up….uheh…uhm._


	23. The Best Laid Plans

            **Talker **– Chapter Twenty-Three: The Best Laid Plans

            _Author's Note: Suffering some writer's block but getting through it for the most part. Chapter 23._

            It took some time to settle the group down after the incident, and even when things did partially calm, the mood was no less uncomfortable. It seemed a pain just to speak to one another, but at this point, as bad as things where, there were matters that needed to be discussed. They sat around another kindled fire in low spirits, now serious where they had, moments ago, been at least a bit jovial with one another. "We're down to the ropes." Kenneth said as he scratched his neck. "Now I know it's not a good plan, but somehow, we're gonna have to go back out there."

            "With no defenses and no supplies…" Terry said this not as an objection, but more as to assure himself of the severity of their situation. He ran a hand over the side of his face.

            Kenneth desperately wanted to retort with one of his sturdy 'we've gotten out of worse' speeches, but he knew that it would be a lie. They hadn't. Not really; _this_ was about as worse off as it gets. "The thing I wanna talk about is with who and how we get there."

            "Well then we're back to the same argument as before." Ana pointed out. She was sitting away from Tyler, eyes constantly avoiding him. He himself remained with his head low and said nothing. "Who stays and who goes."

            "And I don't think all of us should go." Kenneth admitted. "Too much of a risk."

            "So who?" she repeated.

            Kenneth paused for a long while, brow creased and eyes scanning over the sand as though he were reading his answer from it. He looked up with a stern nod and sighed. "Me and Terry."

            Terry made a gesture of agreement, despite Nicole's outward protest.

            "I don't think so, one of you should stay here to make sure the others are okay. It's like I said before, I wouldn't doubt that you could need someone with a little medical knowledge up there." Ana said.

            "We can use as doctor when we get back." Kenneth decided. "If we get hurt bad enough up there to need serious medical help, chances are it's too damn late. You stop to treat someone and you get killed too."

            "…We can't go treating this like some military operation." Ana shifted in her position, purposely continuing her avoidance of Tyler's small, nervous movements. "We're not planning to leave anyone behind here."

            "Of course we're not planning to leave anyone." Terry cut in. "That's what makes it a risk, it _could_ happen."

            "No." Ana countered gruffly. "No, I'm not letting anyone get left behind. Not again."

            "Which is exactly why _you_ should stay." Kenneth pointed a finger at her. "If you go back for someone who's had it, you get killed too, and instead of one down, we're two down."

            "This isn't a fucking numbers game." She snapped. "Of course I would risk my life for any one of you, that's what will keep us all alive."

            "It'll get us all killed." Kenneth disagreed.

            "Ana's right." Nicole said, eyes still bleeding tears. Though somehow her emotion had died a little, now a cold nonchalance taking its place. "I don't want to do what's best for the group. I wanna do what's best for everyone _in_ the group. Individually."

            "Killing ourselves for each other isn't what's best for all of us." Kenneth rumbled.

            "And you're really one to talk, how many times have you risked your ass for us?" Ana reminded.

            Kenneth shook his head. "Things I did I did for all of us."

            "Don't pretend you wouldn't save any one of us." Terry contested.

            "Why shouldn't I go?" Nicole sat up straight. "I'm fast, I'd bet I can outrun them."

            "No way." Terry ground out simply.

            She was about to reply with resentment to that when Kenneth stopped her. "Maybe, Nicole, but you can't carry as much as the others. Neither could you, Ana, you couldn't haul as much as we'd need."

            "That's not the only thing we have to worry about." She said.

            "We don't even know how many are out there—or if they even _are_ there anymore. We might even be able to slip right in without them noticing." Nicole thought aloud.

            "They sure as hell noticed us before." Said Kenneth.

            "Maybe that's just because we stayed there for so long. Maybe they left by now." She insisted.

            "Why would they leave?" Terry asked.

            "Because there's nothing there to eat." Nicole replied sourly, not wanting to experience the image that she currently was drowning in.

            "They don't have anywhere better to be." Ana spoke, rubbing her arms unconsciously. "If they were anywhere, they'd be closer to where we are now. And we can't plan this out on hopeful 'maybes'."

            "Then why don't you give us some certainties?" Kenneth pushed. "Since you're so worried about the risks."

"That's not fair, Kenneth, I'm trying to help. And I'm just being careful. You went the brash way last time and look what happened." Ana came back, folding her arms tightly over her stomach as she caught his sardonic tone.

            "I'm not saying that we should take everyone and I'm not saying that we should stay there any longer than we need to this time. I want it quick and done."

            "Without regard to consequence?"

            "I didn't say that."

            "You didn't consider it."

            "Okay okay—" Terry broke in, holding up his hands. "Come on you guys, cool it already."

            Ana hesitated before making a semi-apologetic mutter. "I just want to make sure…that we're going the safest way."

            "So do we all." Terry said. "Kenneth is right. He and I should go."

            "Terry-" Nicole started.

            "And we shouldn't stay there any longer than to grab a few things. I can-"

            "Why should you go?" Ana interupted, looking at Terry. "Kenneth and I should go, we're in the best health." She stated.

            "What, because of my arm?" Terry held up his said appendage in slight offense. "It's not that much of a bother, Ana, Christ."

            "Well how much can you carry on it?" she watched him give out an exasperated sigh.

            "Ana-"

            "I'll go." Tyler's voice rose up, making them all stop and turn their heads to him questioningly. It took them a moment to register that, so caught up in the complications of their argument. They hadn't expected him to say anything through this, he was usually so quiet. And if he would say anything, it certainly wouldn't have been…that.

            "…What?" Terry eyed him.

            Tyler looked up, nodding slightly in consideration before he looked around at the eyes on him. "I said…I'll go."

            "You'll go." Kenneth repeated, shaking his head. They were all, of course, inclined to disagree with that. Tyler was sick, he had head troubles—and quite honestly…could they even trust him? Was he capable? But against all of that, something stopped them from saying anything. That something was the very small, minor fact that Tyler had managed to walk his way right out of the center of infestation unbothered.

            Tyler looked around at them expectingly, hands crossed over tensely in his lap. "I have the best chance…I think. Right?"

            "But you…" Terry began, but had to stop and rethink himself. "You can't go up there like that." Was all he said, but he didn't bother to explain why.

            "They didn't even touch me last time." He forced out, clearing his throat. "Why would they? They think I'm a corpse. I can go right past them and they won't give a damn."

            Kenneth and Terry gave each other a look, then both went back to studying Tyler. Ana looked between the three of them in wonderment and Nicole sat silently to await an answer.

            "Maybe…hell, maybe they _wouldn't_…" Kenneth said at last, eyebrows raising.

            "What?" Ana's eyes widened.

            Kenneth looked from Ana to Terry with a shrug, then back to Tyler. "Guy's got a point. They didn't kill him then, so why now?"

            "With that kind of stealth it would be easy." Terry chided, raising his eyebrows also in surprise that the idea hadn't occurred earlier. He just supposed that they hadn't much considered Tyler in group matters.

            "My God, I can't believe you're considering this." Ana growled, causing the three men to turn to her. "We can't send Tyler there alone."

            "Why not?" Kenneth was clearly frustrated by Ana's lack of cooperation by this point.

            "Because he's sick. Something could happen to him. Have you _seen _the crack in his head, Kenneth?" she motioned to Tyler, but did not look at him. 

            "He's up and able now." Kenneth reasoned.

            "So what? You can't seriously be thinking of doing this."

            "I-It's fine…really, I'm up for it." Tyler tried.

            "Ana, they _don't know_ he's _alive_." Terry attempted to point out the obvious upper hand in that.

            "Okay, so maybe they _didn't_ notice that he wasn't one of them last time." Ana said with a contained groan. "That doesn't mean they won't catch on eventually. It's like the resort; it was okay for a while before they realized we were there. What happens if they realize that Tyler's not a zombie?"

            "What are they gonna do, bite him?" Kenneth threw out his hands, thrusting a thumb in Tyler's direction.

            "Gore the living hell out of him, that's what!" she corrected. "We can't ask him to do that."

            "No, I'll do it." Tyler insisted, waving his hands. "It's okay, really, I can do it." He nodded quickly. "I'll just grab the guns and some supplies and I'll be back in no time at all."

            "It's…too…no, I-it's crazy." She concluded. "It's crazy. It's too dangerous."

            "It's the best chance there is." Terry said as he let his gaze fall on Tyler.

            "How can you say that, don't you care that you're putting someone in mortal danger?" Ana turned to him with a disbelieving scoff.

            "It's not that I don't care." He held up his hands as though afraid she would lunge for him. "I care about Tyler's well-being as much as the rest of us. But he's right, he's got the best advantage. If anyone of us can do it, he can."

            Ana remained speechless after that, desperate to protest, but defeated. If Tyler himself volunteered, what could she possibly say to sway them? Part of her wondered if they really did care whether or not the man died…but she had to hurriedly erase that thought. …Of course they cared. They had to. She knew how high the value on life was these days.

            "Okay…" Kenneth took in a breath in thought, eyes traveling back onto Tyler, who looked rather determined about this. "Now Tyler, you _sure_ you're up for this?"

            "Yeah." He nodded briskly.

            "Then I guess that settles it." Kenneth took in a breath, resting his chin on his folded hands. He seemed to be waiting for a response from Ana, but did not receive one.

            "So…what?" Terry said. "We just send him on up there? Just like that?"

            Kenneth paused. "If you got an idea, let's hear it."

            "Well I don't know, I mean we could…Obviously we can't go with him, but I think we should make some kind of security measure." He continued.

            Kenneth thought for a while and came up with little, offering up a wayward thought. "We could go after him a ways. You know, just hold out near the place for a while. So we can hear him yell, if he needs help." He looked over at Ana as though waiting for a reaction that would let him know if the idea appeased her any. She moved her lips slightly without words.

            Terry took a sideways glance at Nicole and breathed a silent sigh. "So then…how's tomorrow morning?"

            _Author's Note: Alright alright, so it was pretty obvious they would send Tyler up there. Hmmmm, hope he doesn't get mauled. Hehehehehe…_


	24. Weary Departure

            **Talker** – Chapter Twenty-Four: Weary Departure 

            _Author's Note: Alright, it may take a while for the next chapter to come up, as it is unfinnished. Up until now, all previously posted chapters had been completed prior to having been added, they've just been going through editing. But seeing as chapter twenty-five is unfinished and unedited…well, things might go slower pending on my time to write. So, enjoy. Thank you for reviewing. (Hey, I'm actually finishing a story for once!) But I won't say how many chapters are left…maybe two, three, four, EIGHTEEN, YOU DON'T KNOW, HAHAHAHA—_

Tyler pulled his shirt back down to cover the wound in his side. It was healing pretty well, so for that at least he was glad. Though if that small injury was the only thing weighing on his mind at the moment, he maybe truly have a reason to rejoice—as it stood, the sun having risen after a night of very uneasy sleep, he was beginning to feel the pressure of his decision. The few light moments that he had been asleep, he was plagued with nightmarish visions of the scenario he was about to willingly face. The zombies hadn't given him a second glance back at the resort, but who's to say that Ana wasn't right? Maybe they _would_ see him for what he desperately hoped he still was. Tyler was determined, however, and all things considered, he did not regret his suggestion to venture out there alone. Not that he was exactly comfortable with the idea…Who would be?

The dreams he had the previous night still somehow bothered him more than he was sure they should have. He dreamed of various negative things, such as wandering alone in the ruined city from which he came, no people anywhere, but thank God for that. It may have been the conjuration of a battle-scarred mind, it may have been a something that he had indeed experienced, but at this point he could no longer dicern much between dream and memory. Neither really mattered now, did they? Not now, when the survivors of this island depended solely on the future. Depended on him…Hey, at least he wasn't as useless as he feared he was. If he succeeded, that was.

He turned towards the trees and sighed at the cool light of morning drawn over the barely twitching palms, relishing the bleak but noticable color of it all. It was something that was his alone at the moment, not the brisk city mornings that he'd looked upon appriciatively on his way out the door among the hundreds of thousands around him. It seemed like years ago that he'd even had the opportunity. But despite the fact that he never would have it again, he still somehow appriciated this. After all, as far as he knew, it could be the last sunrise he got to see. And he wouldn't miss that show for anything. Too bad that meant his last meal would be another Power Bar. And too bad he would leave the others on such bad terms…He just hoped that they would forgive him, or that they would understand. But that was enough of this sentimental 'last rights' crap, he decided.

He should be focused on the task at hand. His motivation was the lives of his only fellow men (and women respectively) left living, and he wouldn't fuck up this time. What happened to good old reliable Tyler? He was still there, infected or not. He'd let them know that today. Cracking his neck and rubbing his stiff forearm, he gazed back up and the bluing sky thankfully... Blue was definitely the color he had missed the most. It was a peaceful color, and peace by any measure was always welcome to him. Really truly? Well he was a little less than peaceful feeling at the moment in question, but any calming thought was clung to tightly. Though as the sun rose higher, he knew he'd have to be going soon. He looked down at the pack that they had given him (the one that had previously been carrying all of their supplies) and picked it up, flinging the strap over his shoulder as he turned and began making his way back towards the camp site.

As he turned around, however, he found that someone had already come to meet him here, or to retrieve him, he supposed. Naturally, he should have expected that with tension lingering where it was. But… he hadn't expected it to be Ana after the things that had occurrred the previous day. He honestly wasn't sure what he should say to her, or if she really wished to speak with him at all, but he figured he would start simple enough. After his slight surprise of seeing her, he lowered his head and released a placid sigh. "Hey…" he tried quietly.

He didn't know how long she'd been watching him there, or what exactly she'd come for, but she seemed reluctant to begin whatever was on her mind. She stood about five five away with an unsure expression. "Hey Tyler." She almost whispered that, her eyes meeting his only in fleeting glances.

"Is something…wrong?" he swallowed and looked on at her with regret, knowing why she was so uncomfortable and knowing just as much that it was his fault. He wanted to apologize again, but it would seem so out of place.

"No." she forced out, crossing her arms in a fidgety motion. "The others are waiting for you. They're pretty…confident about this…"

He nodded lightly with a well-meaning smile and looked off to the side, thinking about the others in simultaneous nervousness and determination. "Yeah, well…I'm glad they-"

"I don't want you to go." Ana broke in. He looked to her in shock, blinking a few times. She stood with her gaze down low at her feet and her hands gripping her elbows in an emotion he couldn't quite grasp. Anger? Discomfort? Whatever it was, she seemed, for lack of a better word, ashamed by it.

"I…" he stuttered numbly before putting a thought in order. "…I don't…I mean I don't know what you want to hear…" he spoke softly, confused by her display.

She said nothing, merely shaking her head.

"I know you don't agree with the rest of the group, but I can do it…you just don't trust me?" he bit his lip and waited.

"Trust you…" she shook her head again, letting out a gruff sigh. "Look at what you're willing to do for us. And look at how we've treated you."

"You guys treated me a lot better than you needed to." He protested. They didn't have to take him in. Feed him, care for him. _He_ was the one that screwed up, didn't she know that?

"I wish that were true." After that there reigned another frivilous silence, a boring and nervous thing that had become the most hated feeling among them nowadays. It meant that they had run out of things to say, and without them, they may as well have been alone.

Tyler eventually refused to let it go on any longer and cleared his throat. "You'd be worried if it was anyone. And it has to be someone. You can't win." He offered a little shrug.

"I know that." She almost snapped. "But you…" another trail off.

"I'll be okay." He said. "I know you worry about what could happen. I've always appriciated that. But it's not that big of a deal, you'll see, I'll be fine. Besides, you and the others won't be so far off."

"A lot that does. What are we gonna do if you need help? It's not like we can just run up there. All we can do is…God, I don't know." She kept her eyes low.

"I don't think that'll happen. Did I tell you I was a good runner? I almost tried out for track in the eigth grade. See, but I failed health class." he tried.

"What happens if you need my help? I won't be able to be there." She reasoned without regard to his stab at lifting humor.

"I feel better than I did before." Well…on the outside anyway. She didn't need to know that. "I'll be okay for just an hour. Less than that, in fact."

"I don't want to have one of my friends get killed on a guess, I don't care how _good_ of a guess it is." She growled back. "I'm not being paranoid, I'm not being over-dramatic. Why won't you all believe me?"

"I do believe you." He hesitantly held up a hand, but then lowered it. "And just because the others disagree with you doesn't mean they think you're crazy. It's like I said. Can't always win…"

"Well it would be nice to win when it counts." She said with a mix of exasperation and resentment. "I'm wondering if this damn island's just made us stir crazy."

"You don't have to worry. Maybe I don't look it, but I'm tough." He thumped his chest lightly.

"…It's not funny." She let out a breath.

"I wrote articles, not sitcoms." He replied sarcastically, shifting his stance a little.

"Stop it." Ana said sternly, but her eyes were still at her feet.

Tyler felt a tightening in his chest as he looked down as well. "I'm sorry."

Again she said nothing, only another sigh ghosting past her lips. He really didn't want this to go on any longer, he could feel an argument coming on and that was the last note he wanted to leave on.

"I've gotta go. They'll be wondering where I am." He made a move forward—

Only to be stopped as Ana came to him unexpectedly, her arms catching him in a tight embrace around the middle. He stopped abruptly, almost falling forward and tripping over her from his pace. "Please, Tyler, don't." she pleaded tenatively. Her voice was somehow calm and level, undoubtedly defying how she felt.

Tyler was frozen in shock, arms raised slightly to allow hers to come around him and mouth hanging open a ways. After everything that had happened last night, this was the last place he'd expect her to go. As his confusion died down, he came to his senses, gingerly leaning one shoulder downward to slide off the bag from his back and catch her up in his own arms. "Ana…Ana, it's okay, really, it is…" he assured gently.

"I don't want you to do this. I don't know if I'm being careful or paranoid or stupid…or selfish…" she said, words muffled into his chest as her arms clutched and relaxed against him in a breif hug. She hadn't exactly planned this out…she just had to convince him somehow. She'd maybe would've pushed him back, or shoved him, anything to make him stop and just fucking listen to her for a change, but now that his arms were on her…it was somehow different. "I don't know, but it feels wrong…"

"I'd…be sorta disappointed if you _weren't _concerned…you know?" he said. "I mean you don't know how much it means that…that you care."

"Of course I care, damn it I didn't-" She said roughly as she gripped his shirt hard, about to say something else (probably rather bitter considering the rising anger in her voice) but stopping herslef.

"I'll be okay Ana, I promise. I-I promise nothing will happen." He said, making a valiant attempt to convince her of something he himself was not sure of. He hoped he was doing a good enough job, but he wasn't always as poetic as he needed to be.

"I just…you don't know…you don't know what they'll…" she stumbled over her words, unable to find a way to explain her reasons.

"I can take care of myself. It's what I'm best at." He insisted.

"This whole idea, it's…well fuck it, this whole situation is awful."

Tyler gave a small half-smile. "I know."

"Every time we try to better ourselves, every time we find a way to make the best out of our surroundings, it turns out we didn't plan it well enough o-or we didn't follow the plan or just some plain shit luck!"

"I know." He repeated.

"Well damn it, what am I supposed to do? I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to go through this again…"

"I know…"

She pulled back out of his arms with no resistance, keeping her hands fisted in his shirt. "…And I've fucking lost it…" she said with a snort, her chest dropping with an angry breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She was fed up with both the circumstances and herself, wondering how it had come to this. Was she experiencing the break down she'd feared so much? She'd come out here to talk some sense into him, not to pour her heart out. "I used to be able to handle anything." She said shamefully.

"You can." He said in a stern but caring tone. One hand still rested on her arm, a small extension of affection but notable all the same. "Ana, just because you know what you have to do doesn't mean you have to like it. Yeah, you do it anyway, but you still don't have to like it."

"You're supposed to deal with it regardless. I feel…" her cheeks flushed and she cast her eyes down, shoulders lowering in self-disgust. "Like I can't do this anymore. Tyler, I've_ never _felt that way."

"Then you're still one up on the rest of us. I thought everyone'd felt that way at least once."

"Not me." She disagreed. "Maybe it's that I'm confident, or arrogant, or whatever, but…but if I lose one more of us…I can't, I just won't make it. I'm at the end of my rope."

"I'm not a liar. I…I promised you that I'd come back. And if… you trust me at anything, trust me at that." He awkwardly pulled her into another quick hug and parted from her, scooping up the bag and moving around her. As he walked, he stopped and turned to look back.

"Tyler-" she tried one last time, turning towards him. But that was it. There was nothing more to do. She gazed upon him with a distant acceptance, but a wallowing dismay, not stopping him again, but clearly wishing he would reconsider. She said that this plan had felt wrong, and she meant it. But when it came down to it…she had no other option to offer in its stead. "It's not you I don't trust…" were the words she chose, but moments later she would want them back in trade for something a little more heartfelt.

Tyler nodded lightly and turned, taking one last glance at her over his shoulder. "Ana…you're in charge of 'Tyler' 'til I get back, okay?" he meant for it to sound joking, to sound uplifting. He couldn't bring himself to smile or to even say the words without discomfort and uneasy jitters in his voice.

"Y…Yeah…" she agreed, lifting a hand hesitantly as he walked off.

 ---

             "Did you see Ana?" Terry asked in concern, looking over Tyler's shoulder anxiously as he approached.

            "Uh, yeah…Yeah, she should be right up." He nodded somberly.

            "Well whenever you're ready, pal." Terry idly shoved his hands into his pockets, letting out a deep sigh without realizing it.

            "I'm ready when you are." He said as he studied Terry for a moment.

            "There was just something I-I wanted to say to you. I guess." Terry looked up and appeared as though he were about to say something, but first looking over his shoulder at Kenneth and Nicole. Kenneth seemed to be in one of those rare gentle moments as he spoke to Nicole, possibly assuring her.

            "What's up?" Tyler couldn't help but feel detatched. He could feel his anxiety gathering in the pit of his stomach and his hands shaking, but part of him was letting go of all that. Maybe it was just a dose of numbness to make dealing with this easier.

            "Just that I…we all appriciate what you're willing to do. Really." He furrowed his brow and paused.

            "I know…Thanks." Tyler made a move to walk past him, but Terry held up a hand.

            "Look man, I know what happened out there wasn't your fault."

            Tyler stopped.

            "I mean it couldn't've been. We just over-reacted…you know that, right?" he shifted in his stance and let his shoulders fall.

            Tyler hesitated for a moment in surprise. "…Uh, I…"

            Terry reached out a hand to touch Tyler's shoulder breifly. "You're a good guy. We all know that. And look, even if it's a good idea or…whatever…you seriously don't have to do this. Ana's right, in a sense, I mean we don't know for sure. We don't want you to get hurt any more than we want one of us…well one of the rest of us to get hurt."

            Tyler knew Terry was sincere…even if he wasn't so sure if the others felt the same. It was good to know at least this much, though. "Don't worry. Believe me, if one of those bastards even looks at me funny I'm running like hell." He smiled weakly and ran a thumb over his beard.

            Terry grinned tiredly and shook his head, looking back towards the rest of the group.

            He heard Terry greeting Ana softly over his shoulder as he walked by, but he didn't make a move to turn. He wasn't so sure he wanted to see her right now. After all, she might be the one to see that he actually was scared. Horrified, really. She was the last person he wanted to see that at the moment. He continued to walk towards the edge of the beach clearing where the path to the resort eventually started, unable to bring himself to look at Nicole and barely able to hold even a glance with Kenneth. He knew Ana and Terry were coming up behind him as he stopped.

            "Okay. Come you guys." Said Kenneth as he stood, giving Nicole a gruff pat on the back. "Tyler, we'll follow you up until about where those tire tracks started. It's far enough from the resort grounds so that those things shouldn't be able to tell we're there."

            Tyler only gave a mute nod and followed Kenneth with his head low, nervous about being in the midsts of the group all over again.

None of them shared a single word or glance to one another on the walk, and as far as their fellows were aware, they didn't share a single thought over each other either. It was just a long stretch of the same uncomfortable silence that had haunted them since the very beginning. All the frustrations and displeasures just boiling at the surface but no reason and no place to express them. So much so that by the time they came to their decided destination, (a semi-clearing in tree density where they could at least all face each other) cautious and observing as they were, they were all at the end of their nerves and just below the verge of showing it. Tyler threw out his chest readily and readjusted the bag's strap around his shoulder, clearing his throat and peering through the trees in a vague attempt to recall the right way.

"You remember where to go from here?" Kenneth looked down at him.

"Just follow the tracks, right?" he dared to take a glance around at his companions.

He suddenly felt Kenneth's hand clamped down on his shoulder, something that almost pushed him over but was the only thing holding him up at the same time. The hand was still an amiable gesture, an unconscious atonement for any discomfort he may have been the cause for Tyler to feel."In and out, you got it? Don't take longer than an hour. Go for the guns first and if any of those fuckers get near you…you run back here. And if you don't come back…"

Tyler nodded with a smirk, about to turn.

"Then we're going up there to get you."

He froze, eyes slightly widening as he gazed straight up at Kenneth, mouth opening in a grasp for words. A question, he was sure. But what question he didn't know.

"So you'd better fucking come back." With that, Kenneth released him and stepped away, apparently preferring not to watch him go, or at least make it look like it was no big deal.

Tyler waited for just a moment longer to sort his head before he nodded again. "…I will." He almost accidentally met Ana's eyes as he said it, then quickly disappeared.


	25. Monsters

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty-Five: Monsters

_Author's Note: Hurrah, chapter twenty-five. Chapter twenty-six is now going through the editing process. Please enjoy, and big squishy hugs and cookies to all my reviewers thus far._

It was like being in a horror movie that you knew ended in everyone dying. He was walking right into the very situation that caused people to yell at a movie screen and jeer the character for his or her stupidity of going to 'check things out' knowing full well that a serial or supernatural killer's been rumored to hang around these parts. Even though this was different than a movie, even though he had no audience, ((_Author's Note: give him some credit, he doesn't know_)) he still felt like that idiot drunken teenager going outside to investigate the mysterious sound in the bushes. That was how they all died in those movies. But he didn't have a choice, much like those actors didn't have the choice. They got a script and they followed it. Somehow he felt the same.

His pace slowed, and every time he caught it doing so, he mentally kicked himself and returned his pace to normal. In and out, in and out, that's what Kenneth had said. If he lagged, he would make them all nervous wondering what the hell was taking him so long. He may as well get it over with, they would either notice him or they wouldn't. Any second now he would see their hideous faces, their gnarled skin and rotten bodies and have to try and pretend that it didn't make him sick. He'd seen it all before and so much worse, the only thing he had to worry about now was just not looking at them. They were dead, nonsentiant, non-existant for all intensive purposes and he needn't shed another thought upon them. Unless of course…he came through the crowd of them and they just happened to turn their heads. He realized again that his pace was slowing, and he sped up instantly.

He did have to admit that he wasn't sure this was the best course of action. For his own sake, anyway.

_"You seriously don't have to do this."_

_"I don't want you to go."_

_"…if you don't come back…"_

Well…not exactly words of confidence. Not only did he owe it to them to try, however, but he should be remembering his own self preservation as well. Even if he would be living as…whatever he was. Half dead? Infected? Whatever you would call it, it was standing on a thin line all the same. He occasionally let his mind graze over the possibility that it might just eventually kill him anyway. He had this immunity or happenstance or whatever had kept him alive so to speak, but with no explanation and certainly no garauntee. He supposed he should just feel grateful that, all things considered, he felt pretty okay. His fever and color blindness were gone and he wasn't dizzy or nauseous…yet.

He knew it wouldn't be much further now. He recognized the way the tracks started to swerve and he would soon see where they ended up; at the totaled jeep mashed up against a tree. His surroundings became more familiar, and in the next glance, there was the very picture he remembered. The twisted metal of the vehicle encasing the base of the heavy-rooted palm and the rotting appendage still decaying in the seat. But he didn't have time to think about the scene or reminice about it any longer than a few seconds, for just as he saw it, he saw _them _as well.

He froze, unable to move as he observed a scattered mess of them on the sand outside the resort, aimlessly meandering around on stiffened legs and waiting for some meal to come across them. From this distance, he couldn't even tell the difference from what they were. Bedraggled and falling apart, there was no clear sign as to whether they were young, old, male, female…for that he would have to get closer, and he didn't want to. He was just waiting, waiting for the moment they would spring to life and realize he was there. That sick, twisted, morbid urge for them to see him as human despite the fact of what they would do with such knowledge. He waited, terrified and shaking like mad, expecting them to move…waiting…

But nothing happened. They didn't see him from here, at least he knew that much. They didn't run screaming towards him in a wild frenzy, and he wondered if his luck was really that good. It was too difficult to move. He couldn't guess how long he stood there gawking, his mind went blank and his legs wouldn't listen to his comands no matter how hard he tried to get the message through. To move forward, he had to move forward. He'd come this far and he wasn't a coward.

At least… he told himself he wasn't a coward; up until now, he hadn't ever had the opportunity to prove otherwise. Determined, he pushed himself forward, almost stumbling in the process but successfully forcing his feet to fall onward. With seven short steps his pace slowed greatly, now only a scant few feet away from a group of them and heart thudding so hard that his chest ached. They still didn't seem to move.

The last time he was here he had blindly tumbled into them, dazed and befuddled as he shoved through the crowd and in whatever direction would take him out of here. His world had been spinning, and truthfully, he didn't understand how he had gotten back to the others at all considering that he didn't remember the way. He just remembered… sensing them. Oh _fuck_. If that wasn't a zombie characteristic he didn't know what was. He was drawn to human flesh. He moved bolder now, still going towards the front door with corpses surrounding him as either side. He came nerve-wrackingly close to one, a tall former man with torn up lips and eyes wildly searching all around it at all times. This was the moment of truth…Tyler waved a trembling hand across the zombie's line of vision.

Nothing. It didn't make a move to him, it didn't look at him. Tyler found it to be a sort of bittersweet revalation. He did it again for good measure—but this time it's eyes snapped to him. Tyler was sure that his stomach had just melted in his body with the burning horror that struck him there, his hand pausing in mid air and his breath crashing into the sudden wall that had formed in his throat. It was looking right at him, there was no question.

It saw him. It saw him and could reach out at any moment it pleased to grab for him, but even still, he couldn't move. He was paralyzed with fear. The tall corpse made a sickening chuff through it's mutilated face and its eyes rolled upwards, foot falling back and then forward again as though it were trying to remember which direction it wanted to go.

Tyler knew that fainting was a very unmanly thing to do, but he felt pretty close to doing so at that. With an indignant grunt, he shoved the zombie back, an unfitting mix of bravery and ignorance in the gesture. The corpse hissed—but not at him. It didn't know a concept like revenge or rage anymore, just that something had happened, and if food was not involved, it had no reason to care. He wasn't food. Tyler stopped to think about that. He wasn't what they wanted. They weren't attacking him. Maybe it had been a bad gamble, but it'd turned up in his favor all the same. And for the first time in a very long time, Tyler thought for a brief moment that mabye, just maybe, he really was as lucky as they said he was. What a perverse feeling of rejoice that was… With a renewed confidence, he nervously dodged around them and at last arrived at the front door of the resort lodge, the door still broken open and dangling on its hinges.

Inside it was just as dark as he remembered it. Despite the straightening out they had done, furniture was turned over and the place was a mess all over again. One zombie that had been shot in the head during the struggle still lay motionless at the bottom of the stairs, bloated rotten arms lying like dropped sacks of meat outstretched before it. With a begrudging sigh, Tyler began his search…

It wasn't difficult to find the kitchen. Nothing in it had been touched aside from a few small things that he knew Ana and the others had used, a testament to the assumption that the resort itself had been taken over immdiately. That could also be guessed from the amount of untouched suitcases and personal items still left in all of the rooms. No, once the disaster struck, these people obviously didn't have time to run, and they certainly didn't use this place as any kind of a hold out. Perhaps there was some kind of emergency gather somewhere on this island that they would have fled to, but he wasn't about to go out there searching. He suspected that one day they would explore the island more out of obligation. Staying on one side of it forever would drive them crazy, and as long as he himself was there to investigate first, they could surely span out a little further.

So he finally had his use. Maybe he would be some good to this group after all. Even if up until this point he seemed to have only cause them damage. He'd so far caused them to fight, panicked them over his medical state, confused them in more ways than one, and not to mention killed their dog…And especially what he'd done to Ana. Though he seemed to have been forgiven, he couldn't imagine how she really felt. As much as he hated to admit it with the situation being as bad as it was, he had felt something for her that he hadn't felt in quite some time. _Lust?_ His mind taunted cruelly. He mentally kicked himself and snorted, languidly shoving the non-parishable food items into the bag he had taken as his mind wandered. No, it hadn't been lust. Christ. Tyler had never considered himself a womanizer, to say the least. Truth be told, he'd never really done well around women.

No, all of his relationships had turned up pretty awful. Two had cheated on him, one he found out was a drug addict and he broke it off there. The others had just…gotten tired of him, he supposed. Or they just had something they needed more out of life than what they could ever have with him. Well why the hell had they bothered to stay in the first place? The sex? _Fantastic._ Said the logical half of his brain. _You're doing something fucking important here, can we find a time to point out your shortcomings later?_ Right. What use was there to remember those girls anyway? Those days were over, and if he didn't focus on his job now, so would be the days at hand. If he found consolation anywhere it was in that he believed he would succeed, and at least give himself a sense of purpose if not the rest of them. He _had_ to be useful, he owed them that much.

It was a moment of numb detatchment before he realized that the bag was full, so with a heave, he pulled it to the ground. He would have to find something else to carry his stuff in. Upstairs it was… He grimaced as he came back to the cadaver at the bottom of the stairs, willing himself to calm as he stepped over it in disgust. Instinctively he expected it to spring to life and snatch his ankle, despite how primitively foolish that sounded. Foolish maybe, and yet disturbingly plausible…he quickly spaced himself from it as he marched up the stairs. He was about to take the last step up when something caught his attention near his feet—the handgun that Terry had dropped. The one Tyler could have picked up had he stopped to think. Then again, had he stopped, it might have been too late. He reached down and grabbed it up off the step, placing it into the waistband of his jeans as he cautiously looked down the hall.

The upper region was much how they left it. The railing was broken and the hallway was thrashed, a grizzly smear of gore still splattered where he had sent one zombie to the floor and watched its head crack open. All the corpses, however, had migrated downstairs, most of them likely in chase and the others due to unconscious wander. So at least he wouldn't have to worry about dealing with them up here. It was difficult to ignore the clutter of his shoes against hardwood floor, an eerie echo in the desserted space surrounding him as he shuffled onward towards what had been his own room. He wasn't exactly sure why.

Inside the bed still had a slept-on look, his old, blood-stained clothes strewn onto the covers in a place he barely remembered putting them. He already hated this place. Just for what it was, or what it was supposed to be. He moved now with a renewed motivation to leave this place, grumbling something uncomfortable as he methodically reached for his old pants. Not quite registering his hand delving into a pocket, he realized that he had turned up his wallet. Why he was getting it he didn't know. Just because of the mere fact that it was his, he supposed…

Finding another duffle bag or two was easy; they were in pretty much every room. He threw in some First Aid kits without much thought, nodding to himself in satisfaction for the idea, and after fetching two more guns (including the rifle), went back downstairs. On his way, a knocked over digital clock on a broken nightstand told him that it was a little past eight. How…abstract the time seemed to be. Those numbers appeared to him futile and surreal, and he found himself confused as to how they had ever held a meaning at all. In an unorganized world such as this, what use was there for measuring the hour? He'd almost completely forgotten about it. He had to laugh to himself a little at that.

He found himself back in the kitchen in no time, apparently not having had as much trouble stepping over that dead zombie at the stairs as before. Maybe he was just too lost in thought. That seemed to be the norm as of late. He came back into the kitchen, setting the bag on the back counter and moving to the pantry when he heard a noise from outside. Just on the other side of the glass doors…It was a clunk and a moan, and he saw the shoulder of one of them at the glass, a yellowish streak of blood marking the place where it had been clumsy enough to walk right into it. He paused for a long while, caught between the reaction of either sneering at it or running away. Why was it trying to get in…? But his panic subsided as it wandered away, no more aware of his presence than it was of its own.

Somehow the idea of these creatures was beginning to anger him. He was angry that he still felt the tingling fear whenever he saw them, despite the fact that they had no intention of attacking him—well that fact alone didn't help. Without the fear for his life, he was free to see them for what they really were. They were just useless, dead bodies, and they seemed so harmless now that it was a torturous mockery to all who had died and struggled under their existence. He could walk out there and hack them to pieces with virtually no resistance whatsoever; these feared and dangerous things that had managed to outpopulate the human race could all be killed by one single man, couldn't they?… And why _not_ just kill them all? How hard would it be?

He snorted to himself and closed up the bag. He now had three bags and a few guns, and with the weight, he knew he couldn't really carry anything else. Well…so that was it. He was pretty much done with this place…And as much of a relief as that was, that haunting grasp of fear still wanted to keep him from going back outside. It was a furious disappointment in himself that forced him to ignore that foolish fear, quickly struggling to pick up his supplies with two bags on one shoulder and the other on the opposite along with the shotgun. Without another thought to this god forsaken place, he turned and slipped out the door back into the lobby, then outside into the open where the mangled corpses still meandered.

The sun had temporarily sheilded itself underneath a layer of cloud cover by the time he made it back outside, throwing ugly shadows over the faces of the zombies standing out front. Many had, for whatever reason, flocked closer towards the entrance—closer to him, and now he found difficulty in finding a route between them. Sighing in annoyance, he dodged past a broken apart woman who had ventured too close and edged away from a few more with only one or two nervous jitters. Just as he thought he had made it into the clear—

A hand clutched at his arm.

He felt bile hitch in his chest as he jerked around, meeting the cold, dead features of a nearly unrecognizable figure and unwittingly dropping all of his things in the process. It looked as though someone had scraped half of its face off with a blunt edge, mouth twisted into a torn-muscled rictus and tongue yellow with decay in its gaping jaw. It wasn't looking at him, exactly. Just staring off into the proverbial abyss wherein its rationality existed, but its fingers were gripping against Tyler's arm as if in an attempt to pull him closer. At first he was too horrified to react, staring up at the taller corpse with a blank numbness and a dizzying fear. It groaned and felt its clumsy, bloody hands over Tyler's body, unthinking, as though suddenly confused at this something in its way. It kept trying to push him away, but in the next instant, was pulling him into itself again.

Tyler flared out and shoved the groping creature against the chest, almost making it fall backwards. It regained its feet quickly and reached out for him again, stiff hands almost touching him before he grabbed its wrists and shoved it away. "Stop!" he snarled, knowing full well it was a futile command. It flailed at him more avidly, struggling with what looked to be the broken bones jutting from its hands. What reason it had to be on him like this was beyond his understanding, but needless to say, it was freaking the hell out of him. It came to grab him again, but this time Tyler felt that strange inhuman growl roll out from the pit of his chest, one he had no control over.

It stopped breifly as though considering that growl, but decided to try and reach him again after all. Tyler backed up in dumbstruck terror for the involuntary sound that he himself had made, shaking his head against the reasonings of his panicked mind that he could not control the instincts of an infected half. He wanted to tear the stupid fucker into shreds, and this coming from himself was frightening. He had always been calm, gentle, and to feel these foreign urges of violence made him break into a cold sweat. He was still backing away, the corpse looming down on him. Giving in momentarily, Tyler reeled back and slammed his weight into the zombie's torso, sending it sprawling head over feet back into the sand with a spasmatic tremor.

"No no no…" Tyler rubbed his face hard with his hands, shaking his head and continuing to back away. "Get away, go away…" he couldn't decided if he made this plea to the zombie reaching out for him or the zombie within himself. No, he wasn't a monster. No no, this was a _disease_, not a supernatural plague. Somewhere, somehow this could be explained by medical research, yeah, somewhere there was an obvious explanation for this if given time and resources. God damn it, he was fooling himself into being scared. That creature was not sensing him out as a fellow infected—it didn't know its fellows from a tree stump, it was just a useless hunk of flesh, just like Ana said. It was grabbing at him because it was suffering some random neuroligical reflex.

He looked up to see that it was up and coming at him yet again. _Fuck_, what did it want? Why was it coming for _him_? Why did he still feel that out of place rage? With another indignant snarl, Tyler pushed it over again, hands acting waywardly as his grip found the rifle. Before the creature could get up again, he fired into its head, bringing up a geyser of blood and pulp. These _damn stupid fucking creatures_, why the hell wouldn't they just _leave him alone_? He surveyed the mangled dead body for a long while. Watching the way blood still bubbled from the neck.

The gun slowly sliding out of his grasp to clunk to the ground. Eventually he found himself collapsed onto the sand, head in his hands as he felt another wave of tears grit past his throat. He'd never had the instinct to kill. The instinct to destroy something if it wasn't a fight for his life. He'd never had that desire to spill blood…until now. As much as he could never admit it before, the infection _had_ effected him. Part of him _was_ a monster. And he feared that more than he feared these army of undead millions.


	26. Hoping For Return

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty-Six: Hoping For Return

_Author's Note: I'm not dead! I swears! Bear with me here. The next chapter should be updated much sooner, I've suddenly uncovered some time and unburied my hiding muse. Thanks for sticking._

Ana sighed as she rested her chin on her hands, staring blankly into the dismal trees before her. Kenneth had taken to a sort of nervous pacing, and although it drove her mad, she felt as though maybe she would start as well. He hadn't been gone long, but it was long enough, and the others were not bothering to conceal their worriedness any longer. Terry rubbed his arm repeatedly as he looked towards the path with a grave stare, looking every once and a while as though he might say something, but always choosing silence. Nicole was most torn, she had never liked Tyler to begin with. But it wasn't as though she wished him harm. Not even after the things he'd done. Kenneth was outwardly unnerved, not masking it with an air of confidence as he was normally like to do. Ana, on the other hand, was struggling with a few problems locked in her own head.

It seemed so pointless to be doing it, but she just couldn't help it. She couldn't stop contemplating the situation and trying to see if there had been any other option to choose from as opposed to Tyler having to do this, despite the fact that the decision had already been made and he was already gone. But there was nothing; truth be told she just hadn't thought about doing anything regarding their dying situation until Kenneth had forced it up. The pessimistic side of her must have just rationalized that 'this was it, why go on?'. How exactly had she managed to let that part reign over her? And now she'd been so busy trying to tell them that Tyler shouldn't go that she hadn't even considered other alternatives. So what was her justification for telling them that this was a stupid idea?

She gave a glance over her fellow fraught companions, apologetic. It was the _only_ idea. It wasn't that the group hadn't considered other options like she'd accused…So why didn't that revalation change her feelings? Dully she sank her head down so that her forehead leaned against her palm, trying to pry an answer from her mind. She still felt like she couldn't let him go. Before, she had attributed this to intuition. Her feelings before had been right, after all. Using her basic judgement, she had already deduced that going to the resort in the first place was a bad idea, and considering what had happened, she'd been right. Then again, if they hadn't gone there, how ever would they have known about Tyler's apparent advantage? It was at about that point she realized intuition had nothing to do with this. No, this didn't feel like it. She wasn't so sure if she actually _sensed_ impending danger, just that she was…worried about it. Maybe it really was just an overactive paranoia.

But why now? Why with this? Why this when it seemed like their best option, when they had a damn good grounds for guessing that it would work? Tyler had the best chance, just like he'd said, and yet she still couldn't help but feel that she would be less worried even if it _had_ been Kenneth or Terry to go. She swallowed a pang of guilt at that. Was that because she really didn't trust Tyler? She hated to think that she assumed him uncapable. Maybe the truth was simply that she didn't know him well enough…She'd known Kenneth and Terry and Nicole for what seemed to be a very long while. She trusted them.

No, that couldn't be right, that didn't make any sense. She mentally shook her head and sighed again, fixing her line-up of self analyzations. She had told Tyler that she trusted him, she wasn't lying. What reason did she have to believe he couldn't do this? He was strong, she knew that much. Anyone to cope with being infected like that without losing their mind had to be a fighter. All Tyler had done was shed a few tears, and even for that he had felt weak. Well if lack of faith in his abilities was not at fault, what was it that made her so uneasy?

Maybe…it was just that she felt somewhat gaurded over Tyler. He had been hers to care for since he came here, a simliar feeling for him developing as one she had for so many patients before. She'd made sure their best intrest was at heart, never allowed them to exhert themselves. Maybe it was just her coddling nature getting the best of her. Tyler wasn't her patient, he was a fellow survivor, and she had no authority over his choices, whether in his health's intrest or not. No more laws, no more rules, just getting done what needed to be done. She still…didn't want him out there. There was still something in her wrenching just thinking about it.

Or she could just be acting like an idiot. She snorted slightly, causing Nicole to glance over at her curiously. Ana dismissed her concern with a sharp nod, signifying nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong…Well, only massive inner turmoil, that was all. Ana straightened up slightly to peer over at Terry, who was still rubbing his arm in that rigid motion hard enough to give himself a rash. Kenneth still paced, slower now, but just as much on edge. With that thought, Ana settled back into her state of brooding, falling again into the wonderment of her nagging emotions. Why wasn't Tyler back yet? It could have been an hour, it could have been five minutes, how would they know? They didn't have a watch or a clock, why would they have set a time in the first place? This was all stupid.

Well now there she went again. Hadn't she already established that it was unfair to call action on a lack of options stupid? It wasn't their fault. They weren't ignorant. _You're worrying too much. You're the one who's ignorant_. Said a cruel voice in her head. _What the hell should you worry so much about Tyler for? If he yelled out, you could hear him. You would know if he was in danger._ What if he had another seizure? How would we know that? _Didn't it look like his injury was getting better? His fever's gone, his color is back, and he can eat again without feeling sick. God, can't you find anything to be happy about?_ She grumbled inwardly. What did her optimism know, besides, he could very easily have another fit without reason. _You keep worrying like that. What is wrong with you?_ She was a doctor. She was supposed to worry about things like that. _You_ were _a_ _doctor. Now now. Not ever again. Just because you're so lovey dovey over Tyler doesn't mean…_

Ana stopped blankly for a moment, hand raising up to her cheek in thought. What was that…? That couldn't have been the reason she felt so uneasy…was it that she _felt _something for him? For the first time, she drew back and dared to remember some of the things that had gone on between them, if for the sake of humoring that horrid voice. They'd gotten along well, yes. Tyler was easy to like underneath his understandable stress. She always felt a great deal of sympathy for him, but she never thought it could have gotten further than that. Maybe she enjoyed his company, maybe she did like getting to know him better. And when he kissed her…maybe it was a little more than shock that kept her still. But fuck, what did _that_ mean? How was this the time or place to even consider something like that? …It didn't matter, those feelings were still there.

She planted her face back into her hands with a mental growl, wanting to rake her nails over her brain to get rid of this thought. How could you suddenly spring feelings for someone without noticing? And why? Tyler wasn't her type at all, not like the other men she'd been with. Maybe he was sweet and gentle like Michael, maybe he was funny, like Luis…okay, maybe he was exactly like her type. Shit. Well this was just perfect. She couldn't feel this way, not now anyway. Not this soon, it was wrong. _He's a good person, he smart, he's attractive, he's strong. And it would be wrong to like him because…?_ Because it was _wrong_. It made her feel like such a whore…After Luis and after Michael, how could she keep moving on like they meant nothing to her? She just jumped off of one man and right onto the next, didn't she?

Clenching her eyes shut, she refused to let the tears come. She wouldn't let them see her cry at something so stupid. She would never let them see her cry period. No one had in quite some time, or at least not that she knew of at the moment. She concealed her tears well after Michael died, and she knew -for that- the others had seen her as strong. In truth, at that moment, she had never felt more fragile. Tyler had come close to seeing her cry, for some reason he had an uncanny talent of sending her barriers cascading down. Damn him for that. But he hadn't, and that's what was important. So she really was selfish after all…She didn't want Tyler to go because she cared for him. Not because it wasn't a good idea.

It was then that a gunshot sounded sharply, and they all were on their feet in an instant with spikes of fear curling up their spines.

"Shit!" Kenneth cried out immediately, eyes wide. Nicole's hands were fisted and clenched into her sleeves, Terry a few feet away with his mouth hanging open and his hands frozen near his head as though he was about to pull at his hair.

"Tyler…" Ana didn't realize she'd let the name fall from her lips, but she didn't register much of anything in her disbelief. Not until she felt Kenneth reach back blindly and place a hand on her shoulder.

"…Don't worry, I-I'm sure he-" he began.

"I wasn't being paranoid damn it…" she snarled. "I wasn't."

"N-No, that had to be…I…" Terry forcefully shook his head.

"I _told_ you!" Ana roughly shoved Kenneth in the chest, barely even giving him the need to adjust his balance. "Damn it, damn it, I _told_ you and you didn't listen to me! There's nothing we can do!" she was frantic now, shock melting into panic, and Kenneth tried to restrain her by the wrists as she began yelling.

"Ana, calm down, he wouldn't have-" Kenneth started.

"No!" she jerked, but he was obviously far stronger. She could feel the tears trying to break past the line, but she wouldn't let them. "Are you happy now? Are you fucking happy now?" she successfully pulled away from him, putting a hand to her head.

"Tyler!" Terry yelled out. "Come on man, where are you?!"

"Where is he…?" Nicole chided quietly, eyes worried as she held a hand near her mouth.

Ana felt her hold slipping. Tyler's words of "Can't awlways win" came back to her with a new kind of bitterness, making the tears slip further. She wiped them away furiously with a swipe of her hand that told the others nothing, replacing her sorrow with frustration, but doing so poorly.

"We have to go up there!" Terry leapt in urgency.

"That's crazy!" Nicole cried.

"Well fuck, we can't let him-"

"Hey, whoah!" came a voice. Tyler's voice, loud and clear in a tone they hadn't heard him use before. "Whoah, whoah, I'm okay, I'm okay!" he was holding up his hands, arms slightly flecked with sour blood and with the supplies he'd gotten down at his sides. His chest was heaving, as though he'd been running. "It's-It's okay…see?" his voice turned timid again.

Kenneth sneered in rage and held up a threatening hand that said 'you better have a damn good reason'. "Man, Tyler, what the _hell_ did you-"

"I'm sorry!" he breathed hard. "I-I'm sorry, I just, one got too close and I guess I…I kind of lost it for a minute. God, I'm sorry, I know I must've-" his eyes flashed to Ana with the most guilt-ridden expression and she jolted slightly under his gaze. "…I'm…I'm okay though, I did it…" he tried lightly.

Ana looked around and put her face down in her hands again momentarily before fidgeting. "Tyler, you fucking…dumbass!" she bounded forward and caught him off guard with another forcible hug, throwing her arms around his neck unabashedly and biting back a sob.

The others were surprised at her display to say the least, but it was not an unwelcome sentiment. After all, she surely knew him better than they did, spent the most time with him.

"I know, I know." Tyler looked over her shoulder with somewhat of a blush, pulling her tight against him.

"You scared me…" she said in a low voice.

"Won't do it again." He promised quietly. She buried her face into his shoulder with a murmur that he didn't quite catch.

"What happened, did they touch you?" Kenneth broke in.

Ana released him, and he almost resisted her from doing so. She stepped back as Tyler shook his head slightly, looking down and around when she felt Terry's friendly touch on her upper arm. "No, not really…one tried to grope me but I um…" he shakily wiped some of the blood on his arms onto his finger tips.

"They didn't follow you, did they?" Terry looked back the way from which he'd come. He didn't suppose it made sense that they would, but the question just seemed natural.

"I don't think so." He assured, ruffling his hair and glancing back momentarily. "They didn't want me." A mixed emotion came off of that.

Ana sympathetically reached her hand towards his side a little before drawing it back quickly, looking down again.

Kenneth knocked him in the shoulder with a hand. "Didn't have a doubt." He said confidently.

"Didn't have a reason to." Terry smiled to Tyler in a friendly sort of way. "Then let's get the hell out of here."

They were all in agreement with that. Kenneth took two of the bags and the gun as Terry reached for the other one, taking another look around.

"Come on, hurry up." Terry leaned his head in said direction as Kenneth was already off, looking over his shoulder at them. Nicole was following after Terry, appearing relieved.

Tyler hesitantly took a step forward, unable to help looking back another time, if for nothing else than in fear that maybe they _would_ follow him. Just maybe. But they didn't…They wouldn't.

"Are you okay?" Ana's voice and gentle hand on his wrist snapped him back, turning to her with a nod.

"Yes." He said quickly. His breathing had returned to normal by now. "How 'bout you?"

She gaped at him for a short moment before she shook her head and looked down with a smirk. "Come on Tyler, let's go."

He blinked and watched her step away. "R-right." They hurriedly caught up with the others.


	27. Also a Popular Drink

**Talker** – Chapter Twenty-Seven: Also a Popular Drink

_Author's Note: Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm taking FOREVER to update. But I've had so little time to write, and this was a loooong chapter. And to Anonymous Coward ( XP ) I'm glad you like my writing! I personally thought I went a little too out-of-character in parts, but hey…it's been months and months since I actually saw the movie. And I also thought that Nicole was…I don't know, sort of a brat? But anyway, reviews are extremely appriciated. A thousand apologies for lateness and a million and one thank yous to those who are still reading. So let's get it under way—_

Tyler was exhausted as he collapsed onto the sand near the beach, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes with a hand and letting out a sharp sigh. Resting his head on the ground, he reflected back onto the time he'd spent with the group that day, for once free of stress and inhibitions. He couldn't remember talking so much to anyone, they had all pretty much spilled their guts. Funny how that was. They shared stories, the humorous or lifting ones anyway, Tyler keeping himself in check not to tell the story that he had told Ana. No one else knew about his embarassing tattoo, and no one ever had to. Unless of course Ana had already told them. He cringed at that thought. He would have stayed with them longer, but he'd started to feel slightly ill and so had gone to lie down. He should have known that Ana would have followed him sooner or later.

She came to him and sat by his right side, and he acknowledged her with a faint smile. "Hey Ty. Just…came to make sure you were okay. You feel sick again?"

"I think I'm just tired." He dismissed her concerns, sitting up again. "Maybe I'll get a good night's sleep for once, huh?"

"As good as a night's sleep in the sand could be." She agreed, looking around. "But seriously, come on up and sleep with us, why don't you? It has to be better than sitting alone out here."

"I'm not alone." He elbowed her slightly.

She rolled her eyes. "Not for now. But you don't expect me to stay out here, do you?" there was a slight flitting of nervousness in her tone, and she hoped he didn't hear it.

He chuckled, but said nothing, staring out again at the ocean shoreline. "Just feel kinda light-headed. I'll come back in a little while."

"Here…" Ana tenatively reached out a hand. "Let me see." She gently let the back of her hand rest against his temple, and his muscles stiffened just a little. She noticed and carefully retracted her hand. "You don't have to worry. I'm a doctor, remember?" she smiled.

He reached up to rub the back of his neck. "Uheh, who's worrying?"

"Well you do feel a little hot." She diagnosed.

"Hm." He swallowed and was looking back again to the shore. She wondered what he was thinking when he did that. He seemed blank, troubled. She noticed something in him that was increasingly distant since his return.

"Something's on your mind." She let that fall out as a statement. Asking the question would have just seemed pointless.

He looked back to her slowly, and she couldn't tell if he was nervous or just reluctant. Either way he was answering, and that was all that really mattered. "Um…Just some things. It…was kinda weird up there for a while." He bowed his head slightly, as though unsure if she really wanted him to get into this conversation.

"Weird how?" she prodded.

Tyler was biting his thumb thoughtfully, neglecting to answer her. He wasn't deliberately ignoring her, but he just couldn't seem to find the right words. "They don't even…seem real…when they're just standing there." Came his quiet response at last.

Ana craned her head back slowly, seemingly contemplating the sky for a moment. She tried to picture that scene, memories flooding back to her eyes of the way the stiffening dead lumbered aimless outside of the mall parking lot. "I guess I know what you mean. Well, I mean, I…I don't know exactly how you felt, but…" she sighed and shook her head.

"It's okay." He dismissed. "It was just sort of eerie is all. You get to naturally expect them to attack…"

She looked back to him briefly in understanding. "You probably really don't want to hear this again, but…you're lucky. I still think so. You should be glad that they didn't hurt you. _I_ am…anyway." She cleared her throat and looked back at the ocean, noting the way it was so level and flat tonight. Just the calm ocean waters, oblivious to the world that had ended around it. Inside she was scolding herself from even having come out here, but she hated the idea of Tyler being out here alone. How could he even stand to be alone anymore? She knew she herself couldn't.

Tyler looked back to her at that last statement, mouth opening in a means to say something. He failed, however. Instead he was forced to merely change the subject. "Guess I'll get used to it, huh?"

"Well I—" Ana paused. She hadn't exactly thought that far ahead. As swept up in the moment of havoc as she had been, she didn't stop to think about the fact that Tyler would need to do this more than once. The thought scared her, to be be perfectly honest. Tyler was shaken as it was, or at least he seemed that way, she couldn't imagine what doing this for the rest of his life would do. What could she tell him? No, you don't have to? "…And are you okay with that…?" Nice, yeah, that was a good choice. Was he 'okay' with being one of the last people on earth? Was he 'okay' with having been infected with this sickness? She mentally grumbled at herself for that.

Tyler let out a few humored chuckles, to her relief. "That's not really a factor anymore…you know?"

Ana looked away. "I know."

He sensed her uneasiness right away and straightened up. "It's okay, really. It's weird, but…it's just something I'll have to get over. You're right, I'm…well I _am_ lucky. I might be one of those things, but I can still _think_, and that—"

"Stop saying that—don't say that." She broke in, pained. "You can't tell me you think for a second that you have anything in common with them." She eyed him in exasparation for a long stretch of his unresponsive silence. "You're one of _us_. The difference between them and us is that they _used_ to be people, and we still are. _You_ still are. Fuck, I thought you already got that through your head." Her words came out harsher than she meant, but she was fed up with all the doubt circling around this past day.

Tyler replied slowly, avoiding her eyes. "Look, no offense Ana…but maybe you wouldn't understand, okay?" normally those words would have sounded defensive, but in the tone it was given, it came across as more of a plea than anything else. It made her grimace just slightly.

"Why not?" she pushed, making a note to keep the bite out of her voice.

Tyler continued to look away. He didn't want to tell her. He didn't want to scare her, make her nervous. But she deserved to know the answers. "It just feels different."

"Feels different." Ana repeated unsurely when he didn't go on.

"Yeah… I feel things I never felt before, I make these horrible sounds sometimes that I can't…that I don't recognize. Can't control. Ana, I-" he braved himself up enough to look at her as he finished. "Back there, at the resort. I wanted to kill it. There was one that just wouldn't keep its hands off me, and I flipped out. I had this urge to kill, and it was fucking awful…You know I've never wanted to kill anything in my life? Not before this. Not…" he sighed again, thinking that perhaps he'd ranted a little too much. Surely none of that made sense.

Ana looked up to meet his bizarre eyes, eyes that were inappropriately calm and somehow almost lovely on him in the most disturbing way. Beyond the distortion of those eyes, however, she could see the fear. Could he really be so mortified of his own existence? She rubbed the side of her face and thought for a moment. "They're already dead." She said quietly. "I'd be worried if you wanted to kill one of us, but they're already dead."

Tyler knew that Ana was taking pity on him, hoping for the best. But he himself had been terrified that his bloodlust might not be that fickle. Even if as he looked upon her now, he felt he could never harm her. Or any of them.

"You're so afraid of these instincts. You saved Terry, didn't you? Wasn't that impulsive?" she reminded.

"I…I don't know." He put his head into his hand. "I'm just kind of fucked up right now…"

Ana took in his frustrated and forlorn state with sympathy, reaching up to his shoulder slowly, but quickly deciding against such affections and letting her hand drop to her lap. Maybe there was nothing she could say right now. Perhaps most of this just had to be worked out by him. She felt helpless, but what else could she do for him but leave him alone? He didn't have a right to hate himself now, if only she could tell him that. With a disheartened murmur and the intent to head back to the camo site, she almost stood, but his next comment halted her in her tracks.

"Which I guess is why I—" he stopped, but didn't look at her, shyly keeping his head down low between his shoulders. "Well…Um…I just…just wanted to say that I was sorry. For the other night. I'm screwed up, Ana, I didn't mean to hurt you."

She couldn't decide how to handle that. Part of her wanted to pretend that night never happened. The other part told her she was being stupid, it was a simple kiss and nothing more. But she didn't know he felt so bad about it. "Oh…Tyler, I don't—" she tried, her voice becoming somewhat difficult to find.

"And I know that's not a good excuse. I don't know why I did it." He took a quick glance at her. "Just don't…hate me for it."

"I don't hate you." She dropped back to her spot immediately. "You don't have to apologize, I…" damn it. It really wasn't fair that he felt so terrible about it when she had already admitted to herself she had some kind of feelings for him. "Look…I…I didn't run because of you, I ran because of me."

"But Ana, I knew about you." He said with a guilty sigh. "Terry told me the story, okay? The whole story. I know where you came from, what all this's done to you. And you don't think I'm a prick for it?" he looked as though he would stop there, but it seemed that there was just more to be said. "You sure as hell deserve better than that. I should've known. I knew what happened to you, I knew I didn't know you—or do know you—as well as I have most women I've kissed, I knew it was the wrong place and damn well the wrong time, but for some reason…none of that stopped me."

A pain struck her as he spoke those words, memories of Luis and Michael coming back to her in a hard blow she hadn't been ready for. Laughs, smiles, tender moments, all wasted when given in such short supply. Tears were readily standing in her eyes, but she wouldn't stoop to shedding them. She'd cried enough tears, enough for the year, enough for a lifetime. She would wake up with the tears streaming down her face and no memory of having cried them, and as far as she was concerned, she needn't anymore. "…Did you feel anything…during it?" she heard herself mumble.

Tyler's countenance shifted to confusion as he looked to her warily, one hand that was previously touching a line of bruising along his collar bone becoming still. "What…?"

She closed her eyes harshly for a minute before opening them. "I mean did you…feel anything…for me?" it sounded so strange to her. She'd never been the really emotional type. Never one of those women who sat down and analyzed their feelings or liked to talk about them.

Tyler appeared less confused at that, but no more content. He swallowed once and stuttered for a few seconds. "Y-yeah, yes…I'm sorry, but I did…I do."

Ana didn't know what to think. He sounded even more ashamed at that confession than he was at having done what he did at all. He really must have thought he took advantage of her…Well perhaps he did, in a certain sense. But not intentionally, and she couldn't blame him for it. There was just a connection between them…simple, really. "Because I felt…" she started awkwardly, but then rethought her statement. "I mean I feel…I think I feel something for you." She looked away with equal discomfort.

They sat there for a long while after that, saying nothing and only regarding one another every so often with a passing glance. Just two fucked up people in a fucked up situation in a fucked up world who had just fucked up too many times for it to fucking matter anymore. Ana had to give a bitter chuckle inward at that: two people struggling to survive in an abandoned world and their foremost problem was still this emotional shit? What happened to all those years of practice she had when it came to detatching from her real feelings? So that kids wouldn't see her cry when she told them a parent or a sibling was dead, so husbands and wives would stay calm when she explained their respective conditions. So that patients would be assured, so that they would never be nervous or afraid when she was caring for them.

Tyler very nearly spoke, but settled instead for shaking his muddled head.

"So then you know…" she let her eyes stay focused in the sand as she sifted her fingers through it. "Why I ran, at least."

He took a moment before responding, slowly nodding his head. "I could take a guess…"

"Well I like you, Tyler…I do." She said, looking at him with sincerity. "I'd like you if you were the last man on earth and I'd like you if you were one in a million others. But…well what would you say about a woman who's fallen in love twice and had it end that way? Who just keeps…moving from guy to guy like that?" she had to fight hard to kill the tears on that one.

Tyler considered her gently for a while as he opened his mouth, hoping for the life of him that he wouldn't say the wrong thing. "You know Ana…" he began lightly as he looked back upon the shoreline, then again to her. "Some people never even fall in love once. So…in a way…I'd have to say—even if she didn't want to hear it," he smirked a little. "the woman was lucky. Like me…in a way. Maybe we both just have the wrong kind of luck."

Ana looked at him for a moment, but she quickly put her face down in her hands when she felt the tears again. The wrong kind of luck. Yeah, that summed it up pretty damn well. She wiped away her tears as she felt his arm on her shoulders.

"Hey, hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—" he began. She turned as he pulled her into him, one arm coming to rest limply on his side. She felt him wince, but she didn't take much notice of it.

"It's not you, it's…" she managed, stumbling over her thoughts in an attempt to justify herself. Pushing back a little, she looked up to him with the tightening in her throat easing up. "It's just that…you're right."

"Oh." He blinked.

Ana offered a sad sort of smile and studied him. "Damn, I'm…sorry, Tyler…Why is it that I always fall apart around you?"

Tyler paused in thought and caught her willing gaze with his own. "Is that really such a bad thing?" There was silence for the span of time wherein he lifted an unsure hand, brushing a finger under her chin.

She reached up enough to pull him down a little, pushing her lips onto his in a motion that was far less than quick but still seemed somehow sudden. When she broke off from the brief and subtle kiss, she watched him, an unreadable look in her stress-clouded eyes. "…Did you want me to do that?" she muttered, furrowing her brow slightly.

A thousand things ran through Tyler's head, uncertainty and befuddlement for that question stalling him. Was this some kind of weird sarcasm? Before he waited too long, he knew he should answer her, but how? He could give her the usual 'did you want to _do_ it?' safety response and spare himself embarassment, but that seemed cheap and senseless. What did she want him to say? _Tell the uncensored truth, ass, didn't that option ever cross your mind? Jesus. It's like talking to a wall here._ That voice always seemed so damn pissed about something. "Yes." He answered bluntly.

"Good." Was the only word he was left with before she was kissing him again, his lips parting of their own accord and his hands placed to her neck and side. He was sure he felt her hands curling through his black hair somewhere in the back of his mind, he could only wonder what his own hands were doing. Everything was an offset blur that offered him little coherency in this mess of things. Not that it mattered anymore. It was good not to be able to think.

Her hands were travelling down, fingers pushing into the bruised and battered muscles at his chest where barely bleeding scratches still lay. She allowed her touch to fall a little lower until she made a long stroke over his side. With a stiff grunt, he suddenly jerked up, breaking the ongoing kiss at the contact. "What's wrong?" she asked instantly, her hand freezing. In that insant she scolded herself, asked herself what the hell she was doing, what _they_ were doing. It took a moment more for her to realize that the warmth of blood had settled onto her fingers.

"Just uh…" Tyler panted slightly. Ana was already handling the supposed problem however.

"Uh, t-take off your shirt, let me see." She fought to keep her demanding doctor's tone, but it was difficult when considering the state of things. She'd asked a thousand and one patients to take off their shirt, but she'd never been making out with them beforehand…

He rigidly did as he was told, pulling off his only slightly blood-flecked shirt and letting it drop near him. As he did so, he could feel Ana's hands prodding gingerly over his wounded area. He didn't look at her face in the concern that she might see him blushing, but if he had, he may have seen her doing much the same. "How did this happen?" she asked, drawing out what looked like a small sliver of wood in her fingers. Looks like he'd missed a piece.

"I fell." He said, recoiling from the memory. He hadn't taken the time to remember it before, but it'd hurt like an absolute bitch.

"Why didn't you say anything? This could've gotten infected." She said as she trailed a thumb over the bruise marks around the puncture wound.

"I don't know, I guess I didn't think it was a big deal." He muttered, suppressing a shiver.

"I should clean this up for you…" she withdrew, but he took her by the wrist and stopped her.

"It's fine." He said, eyes slowly meeting hers. "I mean it's pretty much healed up already. Just…" he hesitated as he felt her hand cross the exposed skin of his chest. "Um, just be careful…"

"Okay…" Ana nodded and reached up with her hands on either side of his face, catching his lips again and rubbing her tongue low onto the tip of his. He willingly relinquished control to her, tenatively placing his arms around her form and obliged to follow any guide she saw to give him. He'd done this so many times before, but he couldn't describe how strange it was as her hands stroked delicately over his chest or to feel the heat of another human body on his skin. Maybe he'd just forgotten these kind of things. Her fingers made paths around his cuts, avoiding those that had not healed and feeling the tender skin of those that recently had. He didn't know why she was taking it this far, but he couldn't find it in him to protest. It shocked him to find just how much he wanted it too. His dizziness and uneasy stomach were already slipping away.

His hands instinctively came between them to the hem of her pants, but stopped there, immediately horrified at where he was going. He couldn't do that. She definitely didn't want him to—He paused, almost choking on the kiss as her own hands gripped at his waist and her thumbs delved slightly underneath them. His lower body was reacting how any man's would react in the given scenario, and realizing this, he blushed furiously and turned his head away. "Uh-Ana, I'm, uh…I mean, w-we, what are you…?"

She stopped her movements and swallowed deeply, looking up at him. "I don't know, I…It's…It's hard to feel this way, but I…I still do. Shit, I'm sorry, if you don't feel the same, I-I-" she drew back a second time, but he halted her again.

"No, I was only-" he rubbed the side of his face in a haze, the other hand holding her arm. "I do feel the same way, but…I only want to if it won't…hurt you."

"There's nothing painful about it…" she daringly placed her palm flat against the front of his pants, making him jump. "This is…about you…not…not them." Her voice wavered slightly. He knew that 'them' meant her other lovers, and he felt compelled to say…something. Anything to her. But 'I'm sorry' never was enough. And he was running out of room to think with her hand pressing up against his…er, well, against him. She could undoubtedly feel exactly how hard he was at the moment, and he nervously wondered what she was going to do with that knowledge. "But it depends…" she continued, gently flexing her hand. "Are you okay with me doing this…? With us doing this…?"

"Yeah, I-It's fine…" he managed to get out as he watched her hand go back up to the zipper of his pants.

She smirked slightly and leaned her head against his chest, unzipping his pants and revealing his boxers underneath along with the obvious rising of his arousal. "Then don't be so tense…I know what I'm doing…" her fingers grazed along him and he let out a sharp breath, taking her into another heated kiss. She responded eagerly to his initiative, hooking her fingers into the rim of his pants and jerking them down slightly past his hips. His stomach tightened and he kneaded his hands into her sides, reaching a bit higher up as her back arched to cup just under her breasts.

He was kissing on her neck for a moment when he was suddenly on his back, Ana straddling him and his feet unconsciously kicking off his shoes. Her jacket had somehow been shed and his hands were now unfastening her pants before he realized it, this time not bothering to stop them once noticed. She moved against him in slow and delicate motions, mindful of his injuries but in check to satisfy both their desires. She judged she was doing a good job of it by the mild groan she extracted from him in the process. Whether or not she was doing better, however, was ambiguous as she went down to kiss him again and blocked any further vocal approval. It was at that time she registered his hands undoing her pants and one sliding down into her under garment with an artful move that made her shudder. He'd had experience, that much was pretty clear.

The force of her kiss intensified as he dipped two fingers further downward and touched them against her center, pushing up into her with little resistence. She moaned without the ability to restrain herself, the suddeness of the familiar sensations breaking her hold on him momentarily before she had sealed her lips to his again. It felt like it had been years since she'd done this, when the reality was that it couldn't have been more than a few months. Then again, she rarely had the desire to aside from the few occasions she would catch Michael's eyes. But she was quickly angered by herself at thinking of one man while kissing another. Even if Tyler was no Micheal, she cared for him just the same. How that had happened in such a short time she may never know.

His pace was comfortably slow as he extended and retracted his fingers into her, giving her a taste of his own previous light-headedness and successfully breaking her focus. She was forced to stop thinking for the time being, her senses crippled by each stroke and her hands bracing herself above his shoulders where he lay as she tried to remember how to kiss. She wanted him to continue, to let the warmth of his movements push her over her edge, but sex was a sort of game to her…and right now she was on the losing side. She wouldn't give into him that easy. With a gentle grip, she took his hand and pushed it away, gaining her breath and her mind back a little as she concentrated on another kiss. Tyler kept his hands at her hips as she rose up, pulling her shirt over her head in a quick motion and tossing it aside before shedding her bra as well in a growing heap of clothing. With that, she welcomed him as he sat up, falling into his lap with her legs loosely around his waist and her arms tight around his neck while his hands roamed her body freely.

As his hands began to draw near her thigh, however, she gave him a playful shove that pushed him back a little and she took over. He seemed a little confused at her manner but was suddenly out of arguments as she took hold of his pants and forced them downward, somehow getting them out of the way for her to feel him with her hand. She traced over the curve of his crotch through the fabric before sliding her hand down under the material and taking his erection in her hand. In that movement, the wind seemed to be knocked out of his lungs, suddenly ragged and uneven. Ana chuckled inwardly at her turn in power, enjoying the way he was trying to bite down on another groan rumbling in his stomach as she clenched her fingers just slightly and made a stroke upwards. She liked the feeling. Tyler had been put through such physical pains lately; she felt as though perhaps she could make up for some of it in this way.

Tyler was struggling with the urge to make any sound. After all, if the others came to investigate…that would be an awkward predicament to say the least. But he was blinded and it was getting harder to think, the friction sending thrumming trickles of heat through his thighs and abdomen. He must've made some kind of articulation, because her lips were on his to silence him quickly while the hand that was not working him went to rub his lower stomach in languid motions. He tried to breathe steady while he grabbed her hips and pushed them back a short ways, taking her pants and underwear down to her knees with trembling hands. At this she released him and pulled her arms back around his neck with another small kiss.

Ana kept her arms around him as he crawled forward, ending up underneath him with her back into the sand. "Comfortable…?" he muttered huskily against her lips, making her laugh silently.

"…Naturally…" she responded, feeling the warmth of his body settle between her legs. He cautiously moved forward and led himself into her, a gasp falling from her throat at the quickly remembered feeling of penetration. "Tyler…" she bit her lip and arched to his touch, only allowing quiet moans to escape her in his first few movements. Once he'd established a moderate rythymn, however, she had to keep her face pressed into his shoulder just to ensure she didn't scream.

Tyler didn't consciously think the memories of his past, but somehow his body did. Things fell together the way they always had in this type of situation, and there was something rather comforting about that fact. It made him believe that he was still the same person…Even if it was just for this while. He bowed his head down breathlessly, strands of feathery black obscuring his vision as he made slow rolling thrusts that he himself was not intentionally controlling. It was familiar, but it was new, and it was beginning to remind them both of some very definate and bold-lined differences between themselves and the soulless undead.

Ana moved a short trail of kisses down his jawline before drawing to his lips again, meeting a passionate response as she delicately touched the various cuts on his skin with remorse. She tried to atone for his pain as if it was somehow her doing, gently rubbing his shoulders and stroking his hair as she countered his deepening moans with heavy shudders and cries of her own. She wasn't really sure at that point whether or not she was actually saying anything in words or if she was just yelling out incoherently—his name might have slipped out a few times, but other than that she was oblivious. When his pace made a sudden increase, she accidentally released a yelp that she knew was too loud.

Tyler hurriedly silenced her with his tongue, feeling a twitch of laughter in his stomach that didn't make it to his throat. "Sorry." came his hissed whisper.

"Don't…ah!" she pulled him down and buried her face into his shoulder again, hoping to stifle herself before she got too out of hand. She was sure she was trying to say something. Don't apologize? Don't stop? Not that it mattered, she didn't want him to do either. She rose her hips to meet his movements again, tears pricking her eyes from the intensity of a maddening roar beginning where he met her.

He groaned inwardly, sending a rippling pluse between them as she clenched her inner muscles onto him and brought him much closer to release than he expected. "A-Ana, nn…I…" he ground out, helpless against the tender kisses she placed along his neck.

She bucked up against him involuntarily, tasting a hot slice of pleasing vibrations coiling into the pit of her stomach before her orgasm hit her with an intensity that felt surely strong enough to kill her. It was in that moment everything in her mind went into a complete inward collapse. She forgot where she was, her situation, how bad things were looking. The only thing she could vaguely grasp at was the incredible sensation pinning her down and mercilessly crashing against her while she jerked and whimpered underneath. She couldn't breathe, but she couldn't stop.

Tyler jumped at the feeling of her nails digging into the back of his neck, her legs squeezing tight against either side of him and her body engulfed in spasms. Without much warning, the muscles of his stomach tightened like a vice grip and threw flashes of hot and cold under his skin, forcing the beginning of ejaculation onto him instantly. He held her hard to him, choking out unrestrained murmurs and moans into her skin while his release went into effect. A blinding white blur shrouded his vision and robbed away ever sense but touch from his nerves, making his own body go into a series of small jitters. Stab after stab eventually eased down, and he sank low onto her when weakness seemed to take over his arms.

Ana blinked against the dizziness in her head and sighed deeply, pulses of heat still snaking through every vein as she tightened her arms around him. He rested his forehead down on her chest and tried to regain his breathing while he rubbed his hands against her sides and hips. She smiled and kissed the top of his head lightly, stroking one hand through his hair. "Are you…always that good?" she whispered, still on the swimming high of a climax.

She could feel a growl of laughter rock slightly against her stomach from him. "Guess…you'll have to wait and see…" he muttered.

She looked over him affectionately and stopped suddenly, biting down on her tongue as a forceful grip of her own laughter threatened to make its way out. Despite her efforts, it won out, and she was quickly laughing at some untold joke.

Tyler looked up hazily, a confused look on his face as he tried to shake the hair out of his face. "What are _you_ laughing at?" he prodded.

"N-nothing, it's just…" she tried to stop, but was unsuccessful.

"What?" Tyler smirked.

"Y-you really do have that tattoo." She confessed, putting a hand over her face as she chuckled madly to herself.

"Ooooh, so you don't think it's manly?" he gently nipped his teeth against her neck.

Ana leaned her head back with a contented breath, vision still unfocused as she closed her eyes. Maybe she _would_ stay out here all night after all.

_Author's Note: If you didn't get the title...um...yeah. Just think about it. _


End file.
